Photo: David McNew/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
December 14th, 2020 should have been the beginning of the end of this horror.
With the administering of the first dose of a vaccine we all waited breathlessly nearly a year for, a year with more death and more grieving than we’d ever known as a nation—so many of us began to feel something we thought we might never feel again: hope.
After months and months of missed birthday parties and graduations, of cancelled trips and aborted plans, of empty store shelves and desperate moments, of lost income and forfeited freedoms—we left behind a year that was stolen by a vicious, insidious virus and headed into a new year where we could finally begin to plan and dream again with expectancy.
We thought we would be celebrating by now.
We thought we’d have beaten this sickness.
What we didn’t realize at the time, was that we would lose another year, not to that that physical virus but to a moral cancer.
We would lose an entire second year of our individual and collective lives, because people around us were so afflicted with political tribalism and so addled by Right-wing propaganda and so bereft of empathy that they would refuse to take a vaccine that could have saved us all.
It would have been unfathomable a year ago, that tens of millions of seemingly intelligent, reasonable, decent adult human beings (and an entire political party) would have refused vaccination, rejected safeguards, and partnered with the disease—but that is where we are. Because of these people (who claim to be patriotic Americans and pro-life Christians), we are feeling a sickening déjà vu of history repeating here.
I write this on a second consecutive Christmas Eve, where hundreds of flights have been cancelled because of another raging virus variant, enabled by the selfishness and recklessness of family members, friends, neighbors, and strangers—I am angrier than I’ve ever been since this pandemic began. I’m angry because I know what could have been.
We could have been through this by now.
We could have have been experiencing something close to normalcy.
We could have been seeing people we love and making plans.
We could have been going to more celebrations and fewer funerals.
But we have lost another year, we have lost hundreds of thousands of people, we are staggering through 12 more months of missed birthday parties and graduations, of cancelled trips and aborted plans, of empty store shelves and desperate moments, of lost income and forfeited freedoms—and the end doesn’t appear in sight.
It was a tragic enough thing to see all the death and sickness and suffering that we have, to try and will ourselves through it all despite the crippling fear, to protect our children emotionally and physically, to withstand the isolation, to push back. the dread, and to feel such saturating sadness. That was almost too much for our resources to bear.
But to now find ourselves heading into a third year of this, knowing that the greatest danger is not the virus itself, but the selfishness, ignorance, and lack of compassion of the people we are tethered to here—that is something that for as long as I live, I will never understand.
We missed a year because an invisible enemy violently stole it away.
We missed a second year because people we live alongside could not be persuaded to be decent.
Heading into a new year, I shudder to think how much more we will lose, knowing we are still fiercely fighting this relentless virus, as well as human beings who have witnessed the same death and sickness and suffering we have—and simply don’t give a damn.
We should have been through this but we are not.
We’re not, because people refuse to do the right thing.
That is a tragedy.
