June 15, 2021 Commentary from under the fan

June 15, 2021 Commentary from under the fan: It was a hot day. The fan breeze out in the porch felt nice as the day was closing out and the fireflies would rise up from the grass and play their strange dance in the twilight. The birds are quieting down and no one, thankfully is using a grass mower that makes the terrible racket. The tempo is slow. I can understand the meaning of the “slow news days.” As I write with a certain sense of uneasiness I realize that the only things to talk about continue to be COVID-19. Today, is the day that we reached 600,000 dead in a part of the World I also call home. Again, 600,000. Since counting began sometimes in March 2020, a little more than a year ago. This is only in one country. That leads the World in the number of deaths. How does that happen? With only housing 5% of the population of the World it leads the World in the number of deaths. This number needs to be put in perspective in our forgetful minds as we continue forward hurriedly burying the history of COVID-19 and wiping it out from our collective minds in a rush to unmask our ignorance. Remind me. Where does it say in the vaccine bottle that we are receiving an elixir that makes us all superheroes whom the virus will not touch. We are now invincible. An Invincibility Syndrome that an entire nation seems to be experiencing. While I was taking food to a COVID-19 victim who had received the full dose of the vaccine. Then we will quibble about “your toy is better than my toy.” Mine was made in ‘mreeka. In America 600,000 have died. The slow news day was only the day on which the 600,000 number was reached, according to some talking head on TV. This is more than the total number of military and civilian Americans killed in the entirety of the Second World War. And we are back to the mall. This is a conundrum that does not have an easy solution – we know that at the cost of 600,000 deaths in one country and close 3.8 million across the World. We are itching to forget. To imagine, in some industries, an unnecessarily normal condition so that we can ostrich out our anxieties. Once we are back to normal the virus will disappear. Once we are vaccinated we will be safe. Once the governments say everything is OK we will be OK. The virus will eventually disappear, or we will engineer a better protection than what we could conjure up under pressure. This is the race, isn’t it? The need to forget, quickly, because if we let it linger it reminds us to be anxious. In the bliss of forgetfulness we can imagine that if it ever happens again it will be a new strain, we beat the original one, but a new strain comes up, what are we to do? Its not our fault. This is the choice that Hobson suggested – go back to the classroom at least for as long as we can – will see what happens next. Why not see what we could do differently and honor the fallen because we learnt something from all this. And not just scamper back as if 3.82 million did not happen, this seems like a collective failure to imagine and grasp a future that could be possible. We have missed our Back to the Future moment and as Marty says at the end of Johnny Be Good – “guess you guys are not ready for that yet.”