June 24, 2021, Commentary from the West

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June 24, 2021, Commentary from the West: Moving through time zones poses an interesting challenge. I am not sure when I am writing. Usually, I write at night – wherever I am. And it is night now. A night after watching another part of the World handle the current crisis. Things are normalized here. There is a certain flirtation with masks. Some use, some don’t. The logic is unclear. It becomes confusing when you are in a new place. I have been in just two places since the pandemic started. Which is one more place than many people I know. And now I am in a third place. I have been here before during the pandemic, once in June 2020, when the city was shut down. Storefronts were boarded up, not only because of the pandemic but also because of the riots. It was a dead city. Then in November of 2020 it looked a little different. There was some more preparation, a little more sense of control. Today it was back to the twenty-seven minutes for a ten-mile drive. The brown haze clouded the mountains to the East. Not only is life returning to the pre-pandemic times, but even the weather is groaning under the renewal of life in the second city. Driving around the parts of the city which only a small percentage of the World population can afford to live in, one realizes that in spite of the unbiased nature of COVID-19, some might have skirted it out of shear privilege. And even if they did not skirt it, there will probably be no knowledge of who actually got it in the canyons that lead up to Mulholland Drive. There is a certain irony in this. There are thousands of unaccounted deaths in places like Bihar, and many more who might have had it and recovered – unknown to the World. Their lack of privilege obscured them from limelight and there are others who could obscure themselves because of the privilege. Obscuring may be a strategy going forward. Many are claiming it will be the “common cold” of the future. We do not count how many had the cold, we do not even announce when we have the cold. It is always and already obscured. Because it is inconsequential. It has become ubiquitous – disappeared from sight. The current crisis is almost delt this way today. The place seemed to have tucked it away in the background. As I drove the famous streets and traveled through iconic town names I could see how this might be treated by the World. Change the agenda, change the emphasis and then you can stay in that place with pink champagne on ice, because when you have entered that special place in time you can never leave.  

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