Yesterday was one of my dear friends’ 60th birthday. Her sister arranged a drive-by parade and her children arranged her Zoom party. As is her fashion, she was running late. What a terrific practice this is, the Zoom gathering. It will never take the place of an in-person party, but it allows people who wouldn’t normally be in attendance to show up and enjoy in the fun.
It was a gathering of 20 or so family and friends to celebrate her big day. Of course, she dropped off the call before she could finish her final remarks! So like her! Her kids put odds on her losing battery on her phone and her laptop at the same time. So funny. Was such a joy for her to enjoy her children, her siblings and her friends, all in one virtual room. One of the wonderful outcomes of quarantine.
I am thankful these wonderful outcomes exist. They exist in juxtaposition to the outcomes that are decidedly not wonderful. You can tell that people are out and about now. How do I know? Well, for two months the newscasters had to dig for stories, other than the latest ridiculous claim by the Buffoon in Chief and his Dastardly Despicable Dipshits. Literally no crime. No accidents. No police brutality (that we knew of.) The entire months of March and April went by without people hurting one another, because everyone was sheltering in place. Nothing was open, so there was nowhere to travel to, nothing to steal, no one to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Except, of course, for the 100,000-plus people whom we’ve lost.
But now, news anchors not only have the horror of the administration to report on, they have police brutality, murder, white supremacists storming state houses, riots in the streets, black men being murdered because they are black, white people claiming to be accosted by black people, white people insisting they don’t need to wear masks, politicians that insist it’s safe to go out when they are quarantining themselves, the list goes on and on.
There is no way any thinking person that lives in this country can see what is happening all around us and not be alarmed, distressed and depressed. There is no way any thinking person cannot see the blatant authoritarianism that is coming out of the administration, setting us all up to steal power whether we remove them by vote or not.
Today, I am ashamed of this country, of what it has become, of the despicable display for all the world to see. We reap what we sow.