(Warning: as you can probably tell, this post is about Coronavirus/Covid 19.
It also references: anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theories, general 2020-ness, mental health problems, Trump, discrimination, ableism, systemic racism, and other systemic discrimination)
“My grandparents lived through the First World War and the Spanish Flu and all that,” my mam said, “it’s weird — they never talked about it much.”
“Well,” I said, “imagine explaining 2020, and the pandemic, to someone who’s not even born yet. How could you even begin to make them understand?”
If a child asked, decades from now, ‘what happened in 2020 and 2021? How did so many people die of Covid?’ — what would you answer?
Where would we start? With the fires and the floods and World War Three trending at the beginning of 2020?
Or would we just jump straight into the Lockdowns, the social distancing, masks, Covid testing, the race for a vaccine…?
How could we explain that while people died, the politicians argued over nonsense?
That they wanted to carry on as usual? That the Lockdowns came (arguably) too late?
That the president of the USA talked sh** the entire time? That he told people to inject bleach?*
That, like many world leaders, he was more interested in business interests and political power than in saving people’s lives?
That doctors and nurses and paramedics and ambulance drivers all over the world were not given the standard of PPE they needed?
* I’m sure you already know, but better safe than sorry: DO NOT INJECT BLEACH. DO NOT DRINK BLEACH. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD!
How do we explain that people refused to wear a mask with such vehemence?
That they somehow saw it as a weakness, or as anti-patriotic, or as a form of government control, even though that makes no goddamn sense?
