June 18, 2021
I took this photo a year ago today, when Trump was still president, the pandemic was still new, and I was just becoming acclimated to isolation. It seems to me that, completely by accident, my camera caught the brittle fragility of that terrifying moment.
If you had told me then that a year later, we would have a hideous official death toll of more than 600,000, but also a new president who had enabled us all to be vaccinated, and that we would be celebrating a new federal holiday, the Juneteenth Day of Observance, that honors American freedom on the anniversary of the day in 1865 that enslaved Americans in Galveston, Texas, learned they were free, I would not have dared to hope you were telling the truth.
And yet, here we are.
It feels like we have lived a century in the past year.
Today, I tried to pick up my Boston life again-- somewhat unsuccessfully: what's with all that traffic?!-- and it got the better of me. I'm going to fall into bed.
But tomorrow is another day.
Happy Juneteenth.
Well it's not over. Not covid19, not Trumpism, not climate change, not the conspiracy theories, not racism, income inequality, not the detachment and loss of connection to each other, with our families, friends, neighbors, communities, countrymen, world and planet. I hate to be so pessimistic.
I read more history and books about our national conditions in the last year than ever. It's important to do so. But it reminds us how insensitive and unrealistic humans can be. And h oh w many generations it can take to come to our senses and fix something long after severe damage has been done. Yet the pressure is building and time is running faster and shorter.
NPR, particularly Maine Public, has been a great source of information, good and bad news. Yesterday a hospital CEO in Missouri reported that the Delta variant of covid19 is beginning to overwhelm his hospital with unvaccinated patients who are either regretting they refused vaccinations or refuse to believe they hsve covid19. And they are dying from the most deadly strain yet, created by the unvaccinated giving covid19 time to mutate to more nifectiiys more deadly strains. 10% of American covid19 cases are the Delta variant. This is increasing and expected to be dominant bt fall. Young children are still not getting vaccinated. Health issues with covid19 survivors are showing up. Vaccinated Americans are giving up on those who won't get vaccinated and a large number of Americans have bought into a FOX and America One reality, an infection more deadly than covid19 because it makes us all vulnerable to every illness of the body, mind and soul possible in the 21st Century, regardless of our vaccinations, NPR, history lessons and clear understandings of our national and human conditions.
One last observation. Coming up with words and names like "CRT" as in "Critical Race Theory" and holiday names like "Juneteenth" doesn't help. We need words and names that are immediately understandable to all of us which convey the value and impact intended. "Indian Wars", "Tulsa Race Riots" or "Wilmington Race Riots" in their day were more understandable than CRT or Juneteenth are today. But "massacres" are what really happened. Words and language matter. If FOX spreads disinformation by abusing words and language, that should be a lesson that we cannot afford to be careless.
Living a century in a year is the perfect description. It seems another lifetime ago, doesn’t it? And yet, we continue to learn how fragile the state of our democracy remains - much of it triggered or brought to light by someone I consider to be one of the (if not THE) most dangerous leader(s) this country has experienced. Then, today, I read that the majority of GOP leaders and rank-and-file Republicans find Vladimir Putin to be a more desirable leader than our current president. Former president Trump was not an aberration, I fear. I suspect he was a mirror of what and who many of us are or want our country to be. The GOP for years has been treading an authoritarian leaning and divisive political direction to hold onto power. We someday may be grateful - despite the traumatizing experience we endured that century ago last year - that the person who became the personalization of this perspective proved to be - in many ways - so inept.