The day before yesterday, I went for a walk in the Memorial Day rain. I'd had to flee facebook as everyone there was reminding me of how exactly I should celebrate the day and whom to thank and the differences between Memorial and Veteran's Day and to thank our current troops for their sacrifice and to certainly not to think about how, every day, the U.S. goes to great expense in personnel, equipment, fuel, and ordnance to "protect American interests" around the globe. I sometimes wonder about days like that and the message-peddling by seemingly well meaning folks who are by proxy spreading the establishment's long-standing and absurd propaganda of American exceptionalism and I can't quite understand how there apparently is, among the peddlers, no realization that, when in power, every nation-state since forever promotes and has promoted this idea and it's nothing new and it's every bit as absurd as promulgating "Mongol exceptionalism", or "Aztec exceptionalism", or "Tudor exceptionalism", or, gasp, "Arab exceptionalism".
I see from my phone that the U.S. has topped 100K deaths related to COVID-19. Regardless of your thoughts on the matter of masks, and quarantines, and shelter-in-place, and people's rights to do things, and the economy, you have to acknowledge that this is a large number. For comparison, total casualties at Gettysburg for both Union and Confederate ran around a half of that number and was such an extreme loss over a three day period that Lincoln had to train his ass up to the battlefield and, in passage, write one of the most iconic speeches of American history in order to respond to the carnage. It's truly amazing, not in a percentage wise mindset with respect to total population, but in a sheer size aspect. In Alaska, the state population is 700K+, so if the losses were localized in the state, that's one in seven folks. Here, at the Moosehead where I type, we could be down one person of the seven sitting at the bar, and given the demographic/lifestyles of these patrons who are spending their glorious afternoons, myself included, revving up into the nightly oblivion, to reasonably expect, 1 to 7 ratio wise, to lose Paul, or Jay, or Sam, or me. Or, since a virus doesn't know shit all about numbers, all of us could go.
Henry Rollins once wrote, "Natural disasters are not enough. You need it to happen to you." When I first read this line it struck me as necessary to keep, like a mantra or prayer, a grand petition to some higher conscioussed being for implementation among us down here in the muck. It's a terrible idea, one that people pale from, the welcoming of unbearable suffering in order to grow/change/whatever. But it's a true one too, a failingly true one. It brings to one's mind people like climate change deniers who have had their homes destroyed by, you know, the effects of climate change, who fail to acknowledge the idea that our individual actions have collective consequences that can lead to our individual misery. The thought doesn't sink in because what happened to them, what happens to us all, is a tragedy, an act of God, something that no-one could have predicted. The sentences fail to deliver on their premise and it hilariously punctuates the theory that, several million years ago, our primate ancestors only had the capability to attend to how many figs were in any given area of tree cover or the overweening urge to squabble among rivals for territory and breeding access.
The assholes in charge cancelled the State Fair, the Scottish Highland games, etc. etc. I fume impotently at these decisions yet I can also acknowledge it is probably for the best. The lack of summer entertainment is a trade off, I suppose a small sacrifice, for the possibility of societal change RE: work schedules, the mass realization of the absurdity of the 40 hour work week, and, hearteningly, the raft of actual consequences for people like that lady who called the cops on a black man in Central Park after he asked her to leash her dog, and the actions being taken against the four Minneapolis police officers who killed a black man in broad daylight, and the gunning down of a black man in Georgia as he went for a run. That it took legions of people on social media to post and repost and repost and mob streets and repost still until enough people across the country got so pissed that, "hey, we live in a police state", and to demand that something, anything be done is awful, true. Yet it's also a reason, for me, for hope, for a grand shouldering on into the bullshit, the everyday garbage, the moiling away for nothing, the quotidian horsecock of life, the never-ending nascent apocalypse and abyss.
brb, biking.
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