I was in the grocery store shopping Friday and I saw people not wearing masks. I saw people wearing masks that didn't cover their nose. I saw people walking the wrong way down aisles, showing no awareness of how they close they were, not social distancing at all. I went into a CVS for the first time since I got my flu shot at the beginning of August and the check out lady got mad I waited for the two couples in front of me, standing right next to each other to get six feet away before I moved up.
A year in and how are people so bad at this? 500,000 dead, a number many say is a big underestimate, and still going, so how do people not care about this?
A lot of people are starting to share things that are "a year ago..." remembrances. Some are from last "normal" thing they did like dinners and drinks out, or trips. Others touch on how they felt at the beginning of all this. I saw one comment that said these were ways of mourning.
Almost a year in I feel the weight of it all.
The kids who didn't get food because they depended on school lunches.
Families evicted.
Families that didn't get to say goodbye, lost people, 50% of the population that suffers we don't know long term effects from Covid, because some people decided them going out to dinner, on vacation, for a beer, was more important than someone else's life.
Hotels with rooms empty and homeless people on the street.
Families who lost people because they couldn't afford NOT to go to work.
Families who lost people because some people decided having sporting events was important.
Law enforcement and government employees who decided masks weren't important, neither was enforcing people using them.
Law enforcement who aggressively attacked people for not wearing masks.
The government for not doing a damn thing with the weeks staying home not really in lockdown, just kinda, because we're American and special and science doesn't mean US, was supposed to buy us.
The people now calling healthcare workers and teachers selfish because they're bringing up totally reasonable questions about the safety of their work environments.
Corporations who saw the past year as a chance to make more money, obscene money, while people lost jobs, went hungry, died.
Schools that went ahead with standardized teaching. Grades. Sports. GPAs.
People who died at home because medical technology is racist and said their oxygen levels were fine. Or because EMS triaged them as not bad enough. Or because they were alone and there was no one there.
People are still dying because they can't afford insulin.
In a year where we we were forced to design from scratch the majority of what we do- school, work, conferences, government, there was a chance, an opportunity, to redesign things and design things by first asking what was wrong with the way we had been doing things, then design things by asking how do we WANT this to work? What needs do we want to serve? Who do we need to center? How do we do this?
But we didn't.
We just didn't.
We chose not to.
We actively doubled down on the policies and approaches we know are harmful.
We did not change how we taught or ran schools or supported our communities.
Teachers and healthcare workers went from heroes to selfish, self-serving monsters, in under a year.
Corporations and people happily cheered Black Lives Mattered when it would make them money or get them shamed for not, but didn't bother following up with local and regional governments to make sure concerns became concrete in who they elected, what budgets got passed.
Corporations, employers, governments decided just a couple of months in to act like we were done, that the worst was over. To just pretend like we weren't all living the plotlines of multiple YA dystopian novels, and everyone needed to keep on keeping on.
It's ridiculous. But it's also uncaring. Barbaric. Cruel.
There has been no acknowledgement of the suffering, the grief, the loss, let alone dealin with all of it.
I don't know how to move in a world that does this. That doesn't care. That just keeps on.
This is what I don't know how to accept. What I refuse to accept.
Honestly how do I deal with, interact with, people I encounter who still think hospitals report more Covid deaths than happened for money? That masks are tyranny? That the virus isn't real, that 500,000 aren't dead?
How do I view people who have traveled in the last year, gone to big family gatherings? Who looked at the last year, at all of it and went "meh."
How do I not think these people are selfish, awful, monsters?
If the last year was not enough to get people and institutions and corporations to change I don't know that anything will.
And that reality, the weight of all the loss and damage and grief, most of which was avoidable, preventable, is what I just don't know what to do with.
The other week a student asked me "do you ever think X will change?" and I said no. I explained I still believe in small moves, that teachers can change minds, in the one one one impact.
But I just don't think I believe in large scale institutional change anymore.
In the same way I cannot believe that it's almost a year in and we're still in this because folks decided they did not want to make small, brief sacrifices for the collective good.
I'm not even surprised at the cruelty, the evil, the selfishness.
But I am tired. After a year of loss, of grief, of this weight, of no help and support, I am tired. And others have dealt with more, lost more, felt more, had less help, less help. And the world just kept going. Kept showing them with every day that it did not care.
It's the Nothing.
And it turns out I've got Nothing.
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