Where Do I Go To Get My World Back?

This is NOT what I signed up for

I can remember when the pandemic began for me as if it was yesterday. It was March 5, 2020, and I was sitting on an airplane in San Diego. I’d been visiting my college roommate for a few days, and while I’d been hearing rumblings about a growing problem with an infectious virus, I hadn’t been paying attention. Then, the night before my flight back to Portland, I checked in online. There were two open seats, which seemed pretty normal.

The following day, as I sat in my seat awaiting take-off, the plane was barely half full. An Asian family, perhaps eight strong, boarded the plane wearing face masks. It caught my attention because that’s not something you see every day. Then a woman sat down in the aisle seat of my row (I was in a window seat), pulled out a tub of disinfecting wipes, and proceeded to wipe everything within reach down.

At that moment, I knew things weren’t going to be as expected for a very, VERY long time. However, my intuition has turned out to be far more correct than I could’ve known.

My flight took off in one world and landed in a very different one. Something changed in the two-plus hours of flight time between San Diego and Portland. When I boarded the plane in San Diego, I’d been feeling pretty optimistic about things. I’d had a great trip and was looking forward to getting home. But, when I deplaned in Portland, it was as if I’d walked through a portal into another world, one where people were scared, uncertain, and suddenly frightened for their lives.

Like most of us, I’ve lived through the past 21+ months thinking that we’d soon be able to see the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel. But, surely this madness and uncertainty couldn’t last indefinitely…could it?? Evidently, it can and is doing precisely that.

The saddest aspect of this period in our collective history is realizing how many truly and profoundly selfish and awful people there are among us. We might be on our way out of this pandemic- if all Americans had done the right thing and gotten vaccinated. Instead, some of our fellow Americans are too selfish/stupid/callous to care about anyone but themselves. Because of this, achieving herd immunity has been virtually impossible, and I get to keep making jokes about natural selection.

America was unfortunate enough to have the worst possible leadership at the worst possible moment in its history. When we needed a leader that would inspire selflessness and sacrifice for the Greater Good, we got Mango Mussolini. We got someone who thoroughly politicized the deadliest pandemic in human history, one that’s killed more than 800,000 Americans to date. That politicization has survived his departure from the White House, in part because three of four Republicans are convinced Joe Biden’s election was illegitimate.

Because of the politicization of the pandemic and the vaccines intended to protect us from it, we’ve staggered from wave to wave and from variant to variant. Just when we begin to think that maybe, just maybe, we might be looking at a light at the end of the tunnel, we realize too late that it’s another oncoming variant.

This is why we can’t have nice things, America.