Voices That Sound Like Mine Pt. 2

Since lamenting the loss of one of the only people and practices we all had in common - a lot has happened in the world to both bring us together and pull us apart. While I can't say Kobe Bryant was the glue that held the planet together, nor that his passing was the beginning of this chaos - it does seem fitting that the Basketball season will not have a 'normal' ending this year.

Hardly anything will be 'normal' this year. It's a Leap Year - one sludge filled day longer than our normal 365; it's a Presidential Election year of arguably more importance than any other election year in US History; it's a global pandemic year that has bled into the aforementioned Presidential Election, watching the world's leaders show colors truer than what we thought to be true, and in many cases seeing the people around us follow suit. School is abnormal if happening at all; healthcare as a whole is more abnormal than it should have possibly been allowed to be, and at least in the good old United States of America - we cannot yet say that we've truly seen the shit-hitting-the-fan in the full force manifestation that we will. Things are not normal, and are in a growing snowball to even less normal as the streets fill with worried faces behind the wheels of all our gas guzzling cars; the lots of grocery stores and gun stores are full and the shelves of foods we usually do not question remain nearly empty along with our once innate ability to believe that something good will come again. When? And honestly at this point - when can we point to in our lifetimes that was objectively, really good?

The Stock Exchange hit it rough this week, and while my boyfriend expressed pain over checking his retirement from the direct hit - all I could think to say was: "according to the math and fundamental logistics involved in the next 45 years before people my age theoretically retire - there wasn't going to be anything in there anyway... but you know, it'll go back up - it always does, babe." It was rough because people are worried about the pandemic; about not having work, about losing it all so might as well cash in what you have; about safe-guarding the money they worked hard for and put in the trust of some guys in suits who apparently are good at striking completely imaginary gold. It's rough because it's all we've ever known.

But in Italy, climate scientists reported the air quality being near pristine as the productivity has shattered to a halt in a nation of quarantine and illness and staying at home to keep everyone safe. Productivity pauses, and the air becomes clean? Does anyone know if the other places put on hold are having similar blue skies, free of the toxic particulate matter thats been killing us slowly this whole time - is anyone else feeling this suggested glimmer, hint at hope that I do - even now as the human race is bursting into flames an inflammatory physical response? Can you hear the streets growing quieter and the birds beginning to sing... if only a little bit louder? Does anyone else think this could be our host planet making suggestion of a chance?

It's morbid followed by morose, but I wonder if we compared COVID-19 to Climate Change - Always, whether explaining the complexity of our terrible infrastructure and the threat of environmental collapse over the next 50 years could turn into a hop-skip-and-jump rather than a namby-pamby leap of faith into the unknown and undesired. Even more morbid and morose, I wonder if the virus' keen sniper's eye to come with greater force for the aged is nature's way of giving children, young people, a chance - at least on paper? Statistics say there are far less young people who vote, and the ones who cannot yet are the ones who have to save the world. I wonder - are the cosmos trying to say something or is this like all other things apparently coincidental? Is that too selfish to ask - or am I just being honest?

See, my own grandparents who are retired and do not believe in the future that I foresee given years worth of morbid research and painful reality-checking have yet to cancel their Cruise. The virus apparently cannot touch their aging bodies in the same way that sea-level rise, economic insecurity, rickety public-health futures, etc. cannot touch them but will very soon, if not already lay their pervy hands all over me. When they called to worry and woe over the thought that the Cruise line may cancel the ordeal, they were not looking for their daughter, or granddaughter's opinion on the matter. Is that selfish - blind perhaps... or are they just simply speaking the same truth that crushed me the moment my grandfather said the bludgeoning crimson words: "well of course the Climate is Changing, the Climate has always been Changing." Was that heart-wrenching moment a premonition for this new rejection of a science that is based in the present, a year later? Am I selfish for following that train of thought down the usual line of worry - or am I again, just being honest?

Spring Break will not be spent at Ski Resorts or on airplanes or at music festivals or houses of faith and while that terminates the last four weeks of my job that I had taken a convenient sabbatical from anyway - I cannot help but wonder if maybe, just maybe, the stalling of toxic gases into the sky might do something in the fight I've been screaming about since I can remember. But my government is bailing out the banks and oil industries and leaving my negative worth in student loans, and the credit card debt of everyone who doesn't quite understand that's something you still have to pay back..., and the mortgage debt, and the economy of being a normal person without a safety net; so spare the people who have invested in retirement or just recreationally in the stock market - everything seems to remain the same, just sans any-kind-of-paycheck while we shutter our windows, binge watch what we've already seen, and wait for our bodies to fall as ill as our feeble minds. But I wonder, I still wonder, will this earth dragging to a halt, even briefly, bring a person like me (who anticipates many pandemics in my future of many kinds) just a glimmer of ecological hope... Morbidly followed by morosely - in earnest and all honesty, I have a strange feeling it might.

I have naïve faith that if the Presidential Election still happens in November, no one in their right mind could possibly vote for the man that decided to put caveats on people without a significant net-worth being granted a financial, let alone physiological life-vest for this, maybe our first apocalypse drill. I have unbridled belief that the climate scientists and advocates of my pedigree and greater are working as overtime as healthcare professionals, watching the way this prescriptive slowness proves that we can turn this ship of sick bodies and minds and machines around... or at least pump the breaks to a speed that is safe for school zones and all of these children - the future's adults - to laugh and play even five minutes longer than they were set to if this pandemic had not decided to grace our race with its malaise.

I have worry that even the people I love the most will not hear this horn, this battle cry as I do today more than usual. It's saying slow down, slow down and stay this way. Stay defensive of your children as it is not simply a virus that draws nearer on their, our, horizons - its a legacy of viral infections of body, mind, and soul that could; should; be avoided if only we slow down and stay putting along with the current that carries us home.

Are the winds changing?

Is it selfish? Is it truth?

Can you feel it? Does it hurt?

Or have I achieved the ultimate self-contained insanity of believing in a light for the human race at the end of a pandemic tunnel?

Hardly anything can be considered normal this year.