I'm Barbara Walters & *THIS* is 2020 (Again)

Barbara Walters:  "Coming to you DEAD & direct from... somewhere hot.  It's not important.  Hey Hugh, hit me with that intro would ya?  

[Intro music plays]  

Hugh Downs:  "Tonight, we've got married couples who can't stand each other fighting like it's lockdown and the kids are on their 300th day of distance learning."

[More intro music plays]  

Barbara Walters:  "And:  Trump vs. Biden (again) like it's the run-up to the 2020 election.  Stunning.  It's as if COVID, inflation, the Summer of George Floyd, the insurrection, the election dispute & all the rest of that mortifying crap never happened... Like it was all a fever dream.  I mean, covering that lunacy the 1st time is probably what killed me but hey, you can only die once amirite!"  

Hugh Downs:  "Good evening..."  

*************************

Yep I'm going to hell for that.  Sue me.  For those who need a refresher, 2020 was the worst year in recent memory.  Not because of any one person or event, but a culmination of events that had been building up over time.  Its fallout has reverberated through 2021, 2022 & 2023, with this year starting to feel, dare I say it, almost NORMAL again.  But normal is what got us into this mess in the 1st place.   

"Normal" is how the country falls like the Soviet Union & the human race ends.

Because our "normal" is anything but.  Our lives begin to end when we, on an individual and collective level, fail to learn from our mistakes & correct course in time to avert disaster.  When we passively stop putting up a fight against the tide of bullshit constantly being shoved down our throats at home, at work, in the political arena, the economic domain & society as a whole by those out to make a quick buck or otherwise benefit from our labor/love in the moment... long-term fallout be damned. 

And that's exactly what we've done:  absolutely nothing has changed since March 2020.  Prices have actually gone UP on groceries, rent, insurance and other daily living necessities.  The virus continues to mutate unchecked as the pandemic is declared "over".  People who hated their jobs and spouses before COVID reached our shores have not changed a goddamned thing except maybe picking up more hours + another side gig while doubling down on their domestic misery by renewing their vows or having more kids to further chain themselves to their garbage partner. 

The statistic that 1 in 4 Americans & 1 in 3 Oklahomans has long COVID has gone largely unnoticed, as has the fact that the U.S. lost over 1 million citizens to the disease & counting--more than any nation on Earth.  More than we lost in the Iraq/Afghanistan/Vietnam/Korean/Civil Wars wars put together (at its height, more people died of COVID per day than if Japan attacked Pearl Harbor daily for 3 months on end).  That's more than the first TEN years of the AIDS epidemic combined.  Did you register what I just said or did you skim over it?  Be honest.  Each of those deaths was an individual with a purpose & a life & at least 1 loved one who cared about them (but probably many more).

This matters because we're the ones who allowed it to spiral so far out of control... pretty much demanded it with our "let us get back to work!" rallies while the rest of the world was paying their citizens to stay home.  Our working conditions & standard of living, or lack thereof, have made America Ground Zero for infectious diseases throughout history:  everything from AIDS to monkeypox to COVID to Typhoid (see: "Typhoid Mary"). This study from 2014 containing commentary on our "crumbling public health infrastructure" (their words) & the many types of contagious illnesses plaguing our country, including hospital-acquired infections caused by things like reusing dirty needles, is particularly chilling. 

I can only imagine how much worse it's gotten since then, with the repeated COVID surges during which nurses were forced to wear trashbags for PPE & watch fellow front-liners die horrid deaths & deal with physical assault from conspiracy theorists while pulling superhuman-length shifts.  Many simply left the profession while those who stayed are more likely to suffer depression, anxiety & substance abuse disorders than pre-2020.  All of this only further serves to weaken our already-strained healthcare system.



What Happened to the Outrage?

There was so much talk during the pandemic (still ongoing, btw) about how people were now "awake" and "never going back" to their old zombified ways, shuffling through the day-to-day grind with their eyes closed to how badly they were getting screwed by their boss, landlord, supervisor & others in power.  Facebook pages boldly named "Stop Paying Rent" and "Kill Your Landlord!" propagated like wildfire.  People seemed to have epiphanies that, omg, I actually can't stand my spouse, my kids are brats & I deserve better.  

And just as quickly as the Facebook pages sprang up, they were gone.  Cheaters went back to their once-despised partners & resumed sharing Kodak moment photos like it never happened.  And needless to say, there's a depressing lack of landlord corpses in our streets.  

WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED TO THAT ENERGY?!  Are your brains really so captivated by Hustle Culture® and consumerism that you're incapable of maintaining even a sliver of dignity or staying true to your word?  Is it because the mean tweets stopped?  Not only did we fall back to baseline, we're now paying MORE for damn near everything than we ever have.  I get that bills must be paid but a lot of you live far beyond your means & confuse wants with "needs".  Also: It's possible to pay your bills without selling your fucking soul so maybe tone down the dramatics.

The real problem is, when you base your happiness on income & your worth on productivity, too much is never enough.  Money is numbers and numbers are infinite.  There's always a new tech gadget, car model, piece of gaudy furniture or designer clothing to acquire & flaunt in front of your peers; a new Instagrammable destination to visit, a new themed party to throw or attend.  But that dopamine boost is very temporary and grows weaker with each successive hit.  Soon your attention span is fried, your receptors burnt to a crisp and you require Epstein/Maxwell levels of novelty to catch a buzz or feel anything at all.  By that point you might as well cash in your chips & call it a day because "they" are onto you.

Sorry.  That escalated quickly.   📈  

We are here.  But we don't have to stay.

The point is we need to LEARN from our mistakes, ya dig?  And we do that by not continuing to make the same ones over and over a la Groundhog Day.  The saying "Do what ya always did, get what ya always got" still rings true.  We can't keep "doing what we always did" and then having a collective autistic societal meltdown* when things (predictably) go to shit.  We're gonna have to step outside our comfort zones, which means taking the initiative to set firm interpersonal boundaries, organize, strike, protest, boycott, budget, be frugal, divorce toxic spouses, make health a top priority, leave dysfunctional relationships, vote with our conscience (or not at all) & engage in community building activities like mutual aid if we want to see any real change in this ugly old world.  Or if you want to hear me quit bitching.  Either/or.  This applies to people in the $950,000/year income bracket as much as the $950/year one. 

And I'll let you in on a little secret:  if you don't believe you can do it and that you're worth it, you're already as good as dead.  You're never going to be the 1%er asshole at the tippy top of the pyramid so you might as well stop simping for him/her/it/shit right now.  I'm not referring to the Supervisor, Manager or other task delegator, I mean the Big Boss:  the CEO or owner of a giant corporation.  The one who flies private & wears $450 sunglasses indoors for his "allergies".  Not some petite-bourgeois bargain basement Bezos who owns a small business--I'm talking an Elon Musk-level psychopa--job creator--who goes to outer space in his free time, doing single-handedly what NASA used to do when we were a proper country.  There are but a handful of these Soros-level oligarchs in total so believing you can become one is more delusional than that Dr. Phil guest who thought she was incubating Baby Jesus in her barren uterus.

TL;DR - I guess I'm disappointed but not surprised at how fast everyone went back to their regularly scheduled lameness after talking such a big revolutionary game when the chips were down.  Whatever made you feel that life was precious & time was short was real--those things are still true.  Your risk of dying of a heart attack, stroke or blood clot to the lungs is still increased due to COVID's lasting effect on the cardiovascular system.  And each reinfection raises your risk of long-term complications.  Sorry if this harshes your mellow but it's true.  And yeah, the vaccine probably does carry some risks (autoimmunity, allergic reactions, etc) for people under age 65 whom it was not developed for.  Combine these things with the stress of being overworked, underpaid & overcharged for everything in a nation without universal healthcare & who knows how long any of us has on this dying blue dot?

Dangerous freedom will always be > peaceful slavery; it shouldn't take 1 million of your fellow Americans dying to awaken you to that fact.  There is no Heavenly reward for conformity or wasting your one precious life as a martyr/enabler of the powerful on a micro or macro level.  The depressing thing is, if COVID and this country's massive under-reaction to it didn't change the way we run our lives, nothing will.  

*Collective Autistic Societal Meltdown (n.) - Assaulting healthcare workers/grocery store clerks/theme park attendees for enforcing mask policies at their jobs; having violent freakouts in mid-flight on commercial airliners; punching "Nazis," storming/smearing shit all over the nation's capitol, liberating Minnesota, killing "TERFs," throwing protesters in unmarked vans in Portland, attempting to revive the Satanic Panic via QAnon, holding maskless superspreader rallies in the midst of the country's most deadly pandemic, sending jackbooted troops in to shut down nonviolent pro-choice protests, cracking the skulls of the elderly and general Kyle Rittenhouse-style feral behavior in the streets.

Whether human or ape, this is definitely primate behavior.  💩