Post 39 - April 19, 2020
Day 39…
Nothing about this life we are now living is normal.
I’m not sure labeling this the “new normal” is helpful.
We are just coping.
We are adjusting our behavior to deal with a crisis.
It feels like we’ve been kidnapped from our families, placed with another family and are being told that these strange new people are now who our family are and that we should just continue living with them unquestioning.
The kidnapping itself was shocking and disorienting but now that we’ve been living with this other family for over a month, it isn’t surprising to not be home. It isn’t disorienting when we wake up in the morning in what seems like somebody else’s bed.
We’ve started getting used to it.
The new Mom’s OK, but not much fun. The new Dad is very strict and doesn’t let us do anything.
Our new siblings are all locked in their own rooms.
We aren’t allowed outside to play.
We can watch a lot of TV but every time we turn it on it seems to be the same show over and over again.
There are moments when we think about our real families and start to miss them, but everyone in the house and on TV keeps telling us that this, where we are living now, is the “new normal”.
We want to go back to our real home, but they won’t let us.
We start to get sad but then new Mom tells us to get over it and wash our hands for like the fifteenth time that day.
And we do.
It is not normal. - new or otherwise
We don’t need to pretend that it is.
This is a time of unprecedented crisis and we are dealing with it.
During World War 2, stockings were in extremely short supply.
They were traded on the black market.
They were bartered for cigarettes and, I am sure, sexual favors.
Everybody wanted them badly.
Stockings back in the day had a seam that ran down the back of the leg.
When they couldn’t find them anywhere, women started drawing a line down the back of their legs with an eyebrow pencil. It made it look like they were actually wearing stockings when really, their legs were bare.
It’s a silly example, maybe, but they were making do.
Nobody could find stockings, everybody wanted them, so somebody came up with this idea and everybody else joined in.
They made do.
That’s what we are doing, we are making do.
At some point after World War 2 was over, stockings became available again and life went on.
In 1953, eight years after the end of the war, Allen Gant invented pantyhose in North Carolina and stockings became a thing of the past.
Nobody needed or wanted them anymore.
We moved on.
I think that it’s worth pointing out that not everything has ground to a halt in these weird times. In the middle of the greatest crisis the planet has faced in our lifetimes, three days ago, the Trump Administration changed the EPA rules and created a new method to calculate the costs and benefits of curbing mercury pollution. These changes are designed to undermine the controls on mercury and many other pollutants by, on paper, reducing the positive health effects and raising the costs. It makes it APPEAR that these regulations are not being effective and, therefore, can be loosened.
Way to take advantage of us all being distracted.
Thanks.
Brexit moves forward in England. They left the EU on January 31. They don’t participate in any decision making now but they are bound by their rules until the end of the year. Two days ago, Boris Johnson doubled down on his firm intention to press forward. The combined financial impact of leaving the EU plus the COVID-19 costs are mind-blowing. Skeptics are saying that the reason Downing St. is moving forward is that there is hope that the overwhelming costs of the virus will actually mask the costs of leaving the EU.
Great.
Politics are getting in the way and making all of this worse.
Yesterday, I finally hit a kind of wall.
I don’t know how much more I can take in from Washington without exploding.
What is coming out of the White House is, quite simply, criminal.
Some of my more politically minded friends are completely losing their minds.
Our government is broken.
Our government is, by any possible measure, corrupt and in need of a reboot.
This is what our founding fathers put into the Declaration of Independence in 1776,
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”
The current administration is not honoring its pact with the people of the United States.
They are not looking out for our safety.
“Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
I do not give my consent to how we are currently being governed on the national level.
So, what am I going to do?
Exactly what I am doing right now.
I will continue to sacrifice the freedoms I once had to live my life as I chose.
Not forever, but for now.
I will not accept any of this as normal, but I will, in total solidarity with all my fellow humans around the globe do everything in my power to uphold my part of our social bargain.
I will keep myself separate.
Not forever, but for now.
We can wait this out.
We aren’t being asked to do that forever, just for the time being.
So, let’s get to it.
Do not get numb to what is going on in Washington D.C.
Keep alert.
They are not interested in our safety and well-being.
They are willing to trade that for money.
We cannot let them do that.
Yet, for the moment, we are stuck with these monsters.
Not forever. But for now.
We can change this.
And we will.
“We have to open for a better future than we have ever had.”
Governor Andrew Cuomo - April 19, 2020