I Am Grateful for COVID-19, and That Is Horrible

A Year Apart

For the last few days, my husband and I have been watching the Frontline PBS documentary, Coronavirus Pandemic. It is about how COVID has impacted the lives of billions in 2020.

The suffering, but also the inequality and injustice, is palpable.

It is heart-breaking.

Yet, both of us, upon review and reflection of everything we have seen through 2020 with the advantage of 2021 hindsight, we agree that COVID was a horrific necessity.

Nothing other than COVID has aroused the world to share, think, and react in real time to real threats with definite choices — many of them wrong.

Without the plague, there was a genuine risk of leaders like Trump being elected and holding on to power. Think of it. Were it not for the pandemic, we believe that the sort of inequality that caused disproportionate death and untold suffering would be so unleashed upon the world, that it would be the end of everything as we know it.

Thanks, (it’s a cringeworthy “thanks”) to a braggadocios bumbling of the pandemic, we came together to choose someone more competent. Even then, the Big Lie almost undid our efforts.

Wizards of wail street

With no pandemic, we believe that leaders such as Putin and Bolsonaro — authoritarians around the world who grasp power by lies and scapegoating — would take over.

Waving their delusional — but considerable power — like a magic wand, such “leaders” promise a return to safety and sanity. With a sweep of such a “like a miracle” wand they dismiss science and sense with a wave of it.

Also, with it, they wove conspiratorial fairy tales about how “they” are coming to destroy life, liberty, and even to “destroy America.” Our patriotism: our determination to forever find, and fix, the broken bits and fragmented shards of community, could have been shattered beyond repair.

Imagine if the worldwide Black Lives Matter movement, or other vital, social momentum building activism, such as Greta’s climate science advocacy, was completely squashed by militaristic policing. (This has actually happened in several places now examining reform) Imagine if the vital statistics and factual warnings from scientific research were suppressed, ignored, and dismissed.

To every person who stands up for justice, thank you.

Imagine if wave after wave of Coronavirus, and its variants, were allowed to rush freely through every population because those who are so silly that they believe it’s more than “the flu,” succumb for lack of public health measures.

Imagine the racism fanned relentlessly to blame China, or “secret labs”. Imagine fever dreams about migration and refugees being encouraged rather than healed. Imagine if we all just shut up, and agreed, that over-policing of people of color was “just a few bad apples.”

Imagine if basic income, even of essential workers, was kept so low we let them sicken, or even die, rather than pay a living wage. Imagine that were the accepted policy going forward.

Imagine massive populations of people polarized to the point that they break up families, communities, safety nets, and common civility.

Imagine no control, or even a voice, to suggest technology invasion and surveillance were overpowering our ability to tell propaganda from reality.

Even now, we have those tone-deaf voices, like Tucker Carlson, or Ron Johnson, trying to destroy the common decency element of our worn-thin veneer of civility.

Think of that being amplified by blaring bull-horns. All bias, all day, every day.

Isn’t humanity itself a plague?

Isn’t Earth being battered and broken into bits by rapacious capitalism? Shouldn’t we stop the drilling and killing rapists and thieves in one fell swoop? What about each individual consumer’s guilty complicity in allowing things like food-based pathogens to run amok? Hint: there are much more to come from our factory farms, because Spillover diseases are increasing, not decreasing.

There are those who say progressives want humanity to expire.

This is wrong for many reasons. Although we can, and do, see the damage done by over-exploitation of air, water, and land, we generally agree that like a woman, or a child, in a violent, battering domestic hell, we don’t want the love to end, we want the abuse to end.

We do not wish for human community to go extinct (nor do we worry this is even possible.) Even with rising endocrine disruption, toxins from our lifestyles, and the end of biodiversity, although the quality of life on Earth is greatly diminished, we won’t expire. We would prefer that people just wake up as soon as possible.

Wake up to the power in your hands that comes from the power of the people.

It does feel horrible to think we are grateful to a worldwide pandemic that has cost us millions of lives. Yet, it is also worth pointing out that it could have been much worse.

We who do not care for the egregious echo of screeched words in our heads like “I told you so,” wish with all our being that the world had been paying attention. And, perhaps now, we are.

For decades we have ignored the alarm bells of climate warming and biodiversity loss. In 2020, our weakness was on full display, today few can afford to deny it.

We might feel depressed in realizing our gratitude for COVID-19, but we also see those chosen to be responsible to cope with it, did not.

Let us all hope that maybe next time, with these painful, and imperative lessons, we will do better.

—

This post was previously published on medium.com.

You Might Also Like These From The Good Men Project

Compliments Men Want to Hear More Often

Relationships Aren’t Easy, But They’re Worth It

The One Thing Men Want More Than Sex

..A Man’s Kiss Tells You Everything