Spring and the Corona Lunacy
Monday gratefuls: Kate in her sewing room. Making cloth masks. With pockets for coffee filters. So good. Oh Death by Ralph Stanley. Talking about death with my old friends on Zoom. Mario, it’s still too abstract. More real in our 80’s or 90’s. Glad he thinks so. The Riyadh, Singapore, San Francisco, Rocky Mountain connection. Got out Jennie’s Dead, started reading. Will start writing when I’m caught up. Feeling better overall.
Might be the imminence of spring. Might be the space between bloody January and today. Might be Kate’s incremental improvements with her fingers and her leaking problems. It certainly is not the current state of Covid-19 testing. Whatever it is, maybe just my cyclical psyche ready for a new era, I’m feeling strong.
Organizing my loft. Again. A periodic task necessitated either by a long down period like this last one or a time of full on work like I’m entering now. Another facet of this change might be an inverse response to cabin fever. I can’t go out, so I may as well go in.
Brother Mark sent me a picture from a rally, a sign that said, Give me Liberty or Give me Covid. These folks understand liberty and freedom in their most restrictive meaning. Liberty means you can’t tell me what to do and freedom means only freedom from, not freedom for, too.
Both have more expansive connotations. Liberty is also the ability to choose for others, to use your power, your resources on behalf of your neighbors. Freedom is not only freedom from the unreasonable intrusion of the state or the opportunity to follow your own dreams wherever they may lead. It’s also freedom to choose community responsibility. Freedom to vote, to organize, to lift up your nation. To stay in your home not only on your own behalf, but also in service to your elders, to the vulnerable.
Give me liberty or give me Covid illustrates too well the blinkered version of Lady Liberty, the one proclaimed by those yellow flags with the snake. That liberty means stay the fuck outta my way. Or, else. Misunderstanding the nature of liberty can be fatal. That sign proves it. Not sure how, or even if, this truncated view of two basic American values gets remedied. Especially if the false choice between liberty and illness gains traction.
What do you when the treasonous bastard encouraging these already misguided folks is the President? Save your sacred Second Amendment, he says. And the connection to all of this is what? Shoot the sick ones? As a New York Times story title says: Head of Government Encourages Anti-Government Protesters. This is where Kristallnacht came from. We’re way past the turn off for a reasonable resolution to this stand off.
What comes next? No idea.
