Congratulations, we made it to Saturday! How did everyone do this week? Were you able to complete what you committed to? I read something this morning that sums up how we all feel right now, and what is surely to come. We are in the Great Pause, being given a gift wrapped in horror and sadness; one we must not ever forget, because the great social gaslight is coming. Between the shit show of an administration and the companies that want to be sure their shareholders recoup their losses, we will be the recipients of an onslaught of “you really didn’t see that,” “that wasn’t as bad as it was made out to be,” and “buy this (whatever) and you will feel better.” Its a great essay by Julio Vincent Gambuto, if you want to read it in its entirety.
I’ve also been following Heather Cox Richardson. Her view of current events, through the lens of a historian, is remarkably cogent. In yesterday’s essay, she points out:
“The popularity of politicians who are giving their constituents bad news and asking sacrifices of them seems to me to reveal a public craving for honesty from its politicians after three years of gaslighting. We are tired of having the ground shifting incomprehensibly under us and most of us want facts and reason in the face of deadly pandemic rather than a constantly shifting narrative.”
I don’t know about you, but this is exactly where I am. This so resonates with me. We need to have our elected officials tell us what is real, what they are doing about it, and how they are making things happen to help us, the ones who put them in that spot to begin with. Not this never-ending spew of adolescent word salad.
I was speaking with someone yesterday whom I had just met (on video, of course.) In discussing this crisis we are all living through, I realized that what disturbs me more than anything is that there are whole swaths of people who are invisible. I told him, “The thing I cannot get out of my head is, what happens to the people who are undocumented? What happens to the people who are alone, with no next of kin? What happens to the people whose entire livelihoods were under the table to begin with? If I allow myself, I will fall into the never-ending rabbit hole.” Whenever there is an unspeakable tragedy, this is where my head goes. I write these posts so that I will never forget what happened during this pandemic and its impact on our day-to-day lives. Just as with 9/11, we must never forget.
New York City is burying its unclaimed and invisible in mass graves. Keeping bodies in refrigerated trucks because morgues are overwhelmed. I cannot help but think if my friend Costas was still in New York now, this is what would have happened to him and none of us would ever know. My greatest fear in the early 90s was this friend, with a family who loved him in another country, would become ill or die and no one would know because he was technically illegal. And because this was before smartphones and wifi, there was no way to reach him, either. I have never been so grateful that he went home to his family twenty-some years ago as I am right now.
We are in an unprecedented moment. where we can see clearly our humanity and our obligation to one another. May we come out of this more determined than ever to resist the temptation to resume our “normal” lives, to resist the gaslighting, and to heed the call to right our societal wrongs and care for our fellow humans.