These last two weeks I think I have been mourning stupidity. During the COVID-19 plague we now get to see “all of the people” exit their homes saying stupid things like, “I don’t see any virus! Let’s party!” Meanwhile, I await The Twilight Zone twist where they all drop dead. Perhaps the twist is that they don’t drop dead!
It’s come too soon, because people are very excited to get back to work. The slaves want to chain themselves back to the cubicle and get back to the pain they once knew. It makes me wonder how things would be if we lived in a world of sense and, beyond anything else, care.
I was one of those strange Marianne Williamson supporters during the Democratic debates. She came out with all sorts of platforms (Marianne2020.com) built on a foundation of caring and compassion for humans. Marianne was able to spark a small bit of something in those early times during the annoying political selection process. She had support and attention because she wasn’t wrong. I think the problem was people didn’t know how that fit into “this.”
The truth as I know it to be is that if our government truly cared about protecting people it would have passed whatever legislation needed for the people to be able to put things on hold until a solution was reached. Whether that be for 30 days or 90 days. Pay the people, pause the mortgages and rents, and come up with a plan of how we live our lives in a virus-stricken world. That doesn’t mean a cure or a vaccine. That means asking the serious question, “What is our new normal and how will we implement it?”
Unfortunately, as the President recently said, “I see the new normal being what it was three months ago.”1 That means the new normal will be the old normal and therefore nothing will have changed. Indeed, that is exactly what I see happening. The businesses of old are now attempting to retrofit the world so the old business can be the new business. They’re installing sneeze guards on black jack tables in Las Vegas and other Mr. Fix-it solutions across the nation for all types of gatherings.
The Marianne Williamson type of person sees that the old normal wasn’t working and in fact, to quote Sonya Renee Taylor2, “Normal never was.” We have always been seeking great changes to this planet. I grew up seeing the problems this world faced and the love it needed. As a child my childlike response was that we should just fix it. As a grown ass man my responsible response remains the same, “Why don’t we just fix it?”
The problem is that the majority either doesn’t think anything is broken or they are too comfortable (aka “terrified”) to make the changes needed. Once a person has built an empire they are hardly interested in tearing it down simply to benefit the greater good. There actually aren’t that many people willing to trade in their status quo and get uncomfortable, no matter what kind of brighter future it may bring.
That’s the problem with building sand castles that you don’t expect to ever get washed away. As an Artist and a Cosmic Thing I have tried to move forward in life with a fluid perspective. It’s a little easier to welcome change when you understand that nothing ever stays the same. If you live your life in forever shifting waters you learn to stop clinging to all the things that keep drowning you.
Instead of pulling up the drawbridge and creating a new world of caring change, they seemingly sat on their hands for 30 days and came up with band-aid plans. They did not expect to pay people to stay home for longer than a month. Yet they did not expect the virus to magically disappear within that time either. So, they couldn’t have possibly ever intended this to have really been about saving all that many lives. It was all about the capacity of handling the dying. Flattening the curve so that when it came time to put even more people in hospitals, there would be room. I’m sure someone somewhere in some place of power said something like, “Eventually people have to go back to work and a lot more people will die, but that’s what we have to do to save the economy.” We are now proving they, and we by proxy, will literally do anything to save the old systems.
It’s just so bizarre to me (always has been) that the humans never decided to truly evolve. That instead the humans have always spent their time fighting against the freedoms and protections that they actually need. The main reason we did grow at all is because of our uncontrollable fight to get one over on the next guy.
How many more years do we have to work on a health plan that helps everyone? To create a society where anti-poverty is a thing. Where there is not only a protection plan but a scientific understanding when it comes to handling pandemics and likely nuclear holocausts. With a snap of the fingers we could solve Education, Food, Immigration, Mass Incarceration, to sorting out Peace and actual Justice.
The truth is we could completely rework the structure to make it all work better, because the structure was a made-up playing field to begin with. They needed a stimulus package, so they created it. They needed a bail-out for businesses, so they made it happen. When something is needed for their current structure in times of emergency they suddenly figure out how to do it. They tack it onto the trillions of dollars our great grandchildren will owe and that makes it balance out. Will anyone really ever pay off the trillions of debt that has been manufactured? And if no one ever will then it probably doesn’t matter. If you owed $23 trillion dollars3, would you take it seriously?
They could have taken this tragic situation as a time to reevaluate everything, a 21st Century reset! They could have figured out how to better protect people and to realize that some of the old systems no longer need to carry over into the this new technologically brighter century. But they don’t. They won’t. Because nothing is broken. Everything is fine. It’s fine.
Sources: 1 https://www.itv.com/news/2020-04-30/trump-says-us-will-not-extend-social-distancing-guidelines/ 2 https://twitter.com/BreneBrown/status/1250818370825596930/photo/1 3 https://www.statista.com/statistics/273294/public-debt-of-the-united-states-by-month/
