April 20, 2020
On this day, I am laid up. Ankle got twisted last week, so grandiose plans to explore Paradise on foot all fall of their own weight. Lockdown in Hawaii, already eating outdoors, hoping to travel to Africa in August, but those plans are unlikely to come to fruition. I should be exploring the paradises that imagination can build, convincing myself to use the darkness as mind mulch, pen to paper, fingers to keyboard. I experience Wanderlust, a word with one of the Seven Deadly Sins woven into the word, like it’s something to ask forgiveness for only a few months into The Lockdown. And lust is healthy, so much less damaging than greed or gluttony or envy. Leaving home feels like an urgent journey that cannot be undertaken, hobbled as I am, humbled by real dangers, not those I might have imagined.
The 2020 Olympics are cancelled but the idiot climate crisis deniers, same people as the pandemic deniers redouble their efforts, all competing for the gold medal in the Stupid Olympics, which is unfortunately televised. As Congress battles over which corporations to save, the poorest among us are left to fend for themselves.
The propagandists selling the hoax theories have found themselves INFECTED by their close proximity to entitled disease carriers, shaking hands at conventions with shaky platforms that place the blame for all their ills at the bare and dirty feet of the working poor, defining them as essential workers who cannot shelter in place. Someone could tell them, this coronavirus is comeuppance and IT does not discriminate, killing the science deniers first. Triggering compassion fatigue in the rest of us, we tire of their propaganda, while they themselves are bereft of compassion entirely.
Nothing will ever be the same. It’s all ok when all we need is enough to tide us over, but when thirty days get pulled to sixty days, nothing to care about, it’s all so sweet – months pulled out of the routine like taffy.
We loop back to the home office, back to cooking our own food, back to spoiling our pets, gaining weight and losing friends over what is real, what is lies, and because nobody has to BELIEVE in science, it’s not like Noah’s Ark, which would have been a huge ship, and what if there was a madman at the helm? Like now, like here, like an analogy you all get it right?
If you don’t look, you don’t see, so they quote zero confirmed cases in their community, and leave silent the part where their community has Zero test kits. How could any group of people prefer to NOT know what people are dying of? That’s the black hole where data goes to die, erecting a pyramid upside down on the shifting sands of deliberately ignored logic. Willful ignorance should be a capital crime, wait, maybe it IS.