It’s almost Christmas and like evil clockwork, Covid has decided to raise its voice with a vengeance in the form of Omarion Omicron. There is a lot about the emergence of this new variant that is both frustrating and exhausting but also infuriating and troubling. It’s infuriating and troubling because of the US’s reaction to South Africa after they so graciously shared their scientific findings. The US acted as if SA manufactured the variant themselves, held the only instance of the mutation, and were planning to unleash it on the world. Subsequently, the US enacted travel restrictions for many countries on the African continent, including: South Africa, Lesotho, Eswatini, Botswana, Namibia, Malawi, Mozambique and Zimbabwe. As outlined in this opinion piece, the decision felt incredibly discriminatory and counter-productive considering how many people travel internationally and the very high likelihood the variant was already abroad (surprise it was). This pandemic has been a constant a reminder of the detrimental effects of American Exceptionalism and how it’s persistence and preservation continues to keep the entire world under the thumb of this virus. Stockpiling vaccines, limiting who can produce them, instituting clumsy travel bans, not having a national plan for stopping the spread, embarrassing finger-pointing, and laughing at the idea of sending out Covid tests to households. The list goes on.
It’s frustrating and exhausting, because good christ, we thought we were, at the very least, out of the worst part and trending towards a new normal. Now we are facing a more contagious variant that infects vaccinated people easily, and we still don’t know that much about the original recipe but we’re getting new spinoffs. I can’t even keep my analogies together, because I’m just too tired.

Did I think Biden would bring in the intellectual and emotional prowess to steer this country in the right direction and unite the states in battling this unprecedented crisis? I had hope. Did I think Biden would continue to basically ignore the pandemic at a national level and cross his fingers that individual states (some who previously denied the severity of Covid-19) would be equipped enough to make their own mandates and fund their own recovery efforts? No, I did not think he would blatantly disregard the idea of national intervention, but I should’ve known after that stipend debacle where we all thought we were getting $2000 checks- but didn’t. Instead we got $1400, because the last administration had already given $600. That was the beginning of the end for me. All that confusion would’ve been so easily avoided if the communication was clearer, but that is never a strong suit in politics and the Democratic party is no different, continuing to disappoint. Yes, there is a bill that will assist with the crisis, but the fact that it’s being held up by one person is insane to me.

What’s the most upsetting about this wave is how preventable it could’ve been. Since the beginning, this piecemeal way of solving the pandemic never seemed foolproof, and mask wearing was immediately politicized thanks to the orange catastrophe whose gifts just keep on giving long after his defeat. The pandemic is unprecedented in a lot of ways, but one of the most glaring ones is the necessity for the entire world to work together on resolutions. If international leadership thought about the pandemic as a global problem instead of an issue for each individual country, there would at least be more resources available and more productive strategies being executed. I read somewhere that the Spanish Flu in 1918 lasted 2 years. That was without the technology/science of today and folks were much less mobile, so it was much more contained, but still devastated millions around the world (~50, 000,000). We are living in very different times than 1918 and the idea that we would be able to contain and diminish this virus without the participation of a majority of most-traveled countries is baffling to me.
This could’ve been avoided if there were serious, comprehensive strategies that countries could follow encompassing the entirety of the planet and resources to support their populations. Yes, it’s not easy to mobilize like that, but you would think that would be a priority to keep everyone safe, but it’s not. Just think about what our world could look like if people were the priority and not profit. If countries worked together instead of against each other or to prove something. What if we had an international plan to stop the spread, if we gave the vaccine freely to everyone- EVERY SINGLE PERSON ON THE PLANET YES, if we gave people money to stay home so they could be safe and feed themselves and their families. I know it’s not helpful to “what if” myself to death, but my what-ifs feel like a hopeful re-imagining of a world that might exist and maybe could exist if governments were ready to evolve.

The holidays are coming and people are at their wits end at this point with the looming inevitability possibility of another shutdown or worse complete inaction. At this point, it truly seems like the American government is saying, “Well, we tried. Good luck!” When in reality there has been little to nothing done on the national scale to keep people physically safe. Yes, they’ve sent checks, yes, they have health & safety suggestions out, but no, there aren’t consequences for any of the states that don’t have mask mandates, except the deaths of their constituents, and the eviction moratorium that was keeping people from being unhoused is going to be ending soon. It seems trivial to mention student loans here but dammit I’m gonna do it anyway. Those are starting back up next year too and will have a significant financial impact on millions of Americans. I am merely scratching the service of what’s been so devastatingly concerning about this country’s response to the pandemic.

It feels like there is an undercurrent of uneasiness in the air. Conversations around how capitalism is destroying us all are becoming more and more a part of the mainstream. People know we can’t go back to how we used to operate and that there are some significant issues with how systems function now. Just look at how Joe Manchin is single-handedly ruining plans for improvements, simply because of how our government poorly works. The founding bigots created the constitution at a very different time, but surely changes would’ve been made to the original framework to consider the much larger population and entirely different priorities of today?! Lol, no.

To think about every single thing that’s going right now that’s out of my control is frankly overwhelming and mind-numbing at the same time. I don’t know how anyone is functioning at full capacity or if anyone is right now. I was sending emails out to clients last week and all I could think is, I must sound like a psycho right now, but I don’t know what else to do. They’re responding, so I think we’re all just running on autopilot. We still have to keep working even though our fabric of life seems to be hanging on by a thread. And it’s tough too, because I work at a great company and have wonderful coworkers, but at the end of the day, I am still expected to produce even though it feels like the world is ending again and again and again. This is not meant to be a complaint because I am grateful to be employed, but I also still wonder what it looks like not be writhing at the feet of capitalism for a paycheck because I need to eat and be housed, things that don’t seem like they should be dictated by how much I could produce, but are. When I start thinking about these different concepts of why we work and how we work my brain starts melting and I wonder how we’ve fallen so far from being one with the land and each other to living in a society that produces a magazine proclaiming a feckless billionaire to be man of the year while health care workers and scientists have been quite literally keeping us all alive.
I just want to live in a world where safety and acceptance aren’t contingent on how much $$$$ you can make for a company and where vaccines were freely available to the entire damn world. And with that, here’s to yet another wave. I hope everyone is staying as safe as possible, talking to friends, seeing a therapist, and being the utmost forgiving with yourself, because this shit isn’t easy and doesn’t seem like it will be going away any time soon.