My mother died at the beginning fo the pandemic (March 20th, 2020) not of Covid. We dad a very small family memorial that summer, and then I commissioned a video tribute from all the people she had touched at the hospital where she worked. It made me feel better and was fairly easy to do.
Be careful when you get the booster. For the first 10-14 days you'll be significantly more vulnerable to COVID than you were before you got it. Then the protection kicks in.
I'm so sorry for your loss - I too love a person who "extracts a cost to be close to and then repays that cost with rare and complicated gifts of personality"—the best kind of person, really.
And thank you for the breath of fresh air on COVID restrictions. I'm higher risk than many, and have also diligently followed all of the precautions, while cautiously trying to ease back into normal life...but to me, both extremes are making it so hard on the rest of us. Those who refuse to take any precautions limit my and others' ability to engage in any semblance of normalcy, while those who push for more and more restrictions quite literally do the same.
It was extremely funny to me that when I was browsing twitter when news of T H E O M I C R O N V A R I A N T broke and The Palmer Report of all people one was one of the only non-science accounts on there making the case for remaining calm, waiting for more research to be done because most variants peter out, etc.
It's crueler in that the same feeling hearts that demand the world stop in one moment, flip, dissipate, distract, repel, attract in response to the world over the next few. We are blessed that the world is sufficiently stable and repetitive to re-stir our hearts again down the road.
Thank you for writing this. One thing I genuinely worry about with this stuff is the mask effectively never going away, especially during the winter, for people who work public facing service jobs. I see people on social media who have work from home jobs and never leave the house tweeting at Gov Hochul demanding a new mask mandate despite the vaccine passport in place. Meanwhile I have worked and worn the mask during work for forty hours a week through almost the entire pandemic, lost my job during the second NY lockdown and had to take the bus to Jersey to work. Now thanks to the vaccine passport I can enjoy my job again, but I feel for workers on the West Coast where the mask mandate resumed, regardless of vaccine status, during the delta variant. I would loathe to see a two tiered system emerge in the big liberal cities, where one class of people wears a mask for two seconds while going into a bar or restaurant to enjoy themselves, while another class waits on them wearing a mask for their entire working day, forty hours a week forever.
I live in Nevada. We had a full-ish lockdown for probably 3 months. Thing is, this was partially voluntary: the Strip shut down before the government stepped in. After that, we had capacity constraints. Restaurants were capped at 50% capacity, despite them looking pretty darn close to full. We've also had a mask mandate the whole time, though many of these masks sit below the nose, or even below the chin. I've never seen a vaccine passport, and I've only had to present my card at optional workplace visits. Nowadays, it seems like every restaurant and public event is packed.
And this is in a state with Democratic governor, two democratic senators, and a democratic legislature.
I don't have any grand conclusions here, other than that maybe NY went uniquely crazy over this stuff.
I'd also like to add that I fully support any mandate that makes the Nets worse.
First let me say that was a beautiful tribute to your friend.
Second, because my position on COVID-19 sounds like it's almost exactly Freddie's, I want to note that it's a real shame that the pandemic stopped being personal and became so political. In many ways this whole thing was a story about millions of personal tragedies but also amazing human resilience and ultimately a story about countries all across the globe sciencing up a solution. It's a beautiful mixture of all the things that make life so horrifying and so wonderful. That could've been the Covid-19 story.
But instead, we said "fuck it, let's culture war this thing!"
Freddie, just have to thank you for your writing, as a long-time liberal who has been seeing what you're seeing, but who could never express it so well.
What's badly needed are health authorities who aren't politically compromised. Fauci is compromised -- both in reality and also in public perception. The fact that Biden keeps clinging to him (apparently for no better reason than petty in-group loyalty) is just contributing to the sense of confusion, distrust, and chaos.
I lost my best friend over this time period who died in January 2021 (not COVID). I had a virtual Mass said in her memory that was not much comfort. Thank you for expressing what many of us likely felt losing people during this period.
I read about places in the U.S. where not masking is treated like smoking, and it seems dreadful to me. Online I see a lot of people being outraged if they see people unmasked. I've had the shots & booster and keep a mask handy for the federal buildings (like the USPS) that require them. But I live in the South and most people don't mask except where required. We are outside a lot, maybe that helps. Schools were open all during 2020-2021 w/o masks. Children are seated further apart and ventilation systems improved. Children have after-school sports outside w/o masks. Life has been fairly normal and people are not tormented by the "Praetorian guard of busybodies" (This line was wonderful). Plus a really good college football season and MLB season have kept spirits up. Life does not need to be as constrained as it is in some places.
What I've come to hate, more than anything, is coming to see how this "Praetorian Guard of busybodies" lives in a life inside me, a life that works through me. You can call it a totalizing drive toward social domination; you can call it the "spirit of Enlightenment"; you can call it bullshit and say it's not there. But it's there. Waiting with a pulsating, bright-orange glow.
It kills me that people act like a world where you just sit inside on Zoom all day and get everything delivered to your door was possible. I can't think of anything which typifies the bourgeois nature of today's liberalism more than that. It's as if many of them literally think everyone works an office job and the people making, building, and delivering everything simply don't exist. It's no wonder this attitude caught on like wildfire in Manhattan and other urban liberal enclaves. They are the poster children for this kind of thinking.
I hate even talking about COVID. Two years of arguments has been enough for three lifetimes.
Have you watched The Leftovers? I'm nearly done with season two of three. There's a cult that wears white and doesn't speak and smokes and follows people around ominously and their whole thing is "we are a living reminder" of what happened. They don't want people to move on; they refuse to let people move on, sometimes in horrific, cruel fashion. One of its members lost her mother the day before the worldwide event that the show is premised on, and she's resentful of the fact that her loss has been subsumed.
I think the resentment, or at least the bewilderment, of the world going on is nearly universal with any major loss--or even a good life-changing event, like the birth of a child. When one's inner life is radically altered, the observation of "normalcy" in the world is an affront. We are all precious; we are all insignificant.
TYTY, for this FINE essay, Sir Freddie. :) Sorry so long. Didn’t plan to get so philosophical, and mebbe should-a concentrated more on the present difficulties. Mind just didn’t go down that road tho.
I understand that most all are concerned about this new Omicron variant. Best wishes to all.
Me? I go by the so-called scientific recommendations. Getting booster tomorrow. ALWAYS wear mask because I (almost) NEVER go out. Just my lifestyle before, during, and after. Hasn’t changed ‘cause-a the pandemic. That’s just me. Being retired has advantages, I admit.
Don’t concern myself too much with what other people do. That’s just me.
But whole entire THING, to me, falls into category “what-i-can’t-control.” I would prefer to live, make choices in the hope. But COUNT on it? Memento mori, right? Said before I’m extremely WEIRD, but I make sacrifices for inner tranquility, which comes in handy sometimes. Especially LATELY.
The author’s comments in double-quotes:
***
“Maybe Omicron really is ‘the big one,’ but they’ve said that about every last development in this endless story, so how would we ever know?”
‘Truer words were never said,’ right?
***
“And while they want you to mask up and vaccinate and obey other rules, what’s much more important to them than regulating your behavior is that they let you know that you don’t feel the right way about Covid.”
Weeeel, like I ‘said’ in comments to Your previous, why does it even REGISTER what ‘they’ say. How does what ANYone says, including this right here, have ANY effect on who You fundamentally BE. True, if requires a tough choice. Choice isn’t to ignore, but to KNOW. Know who You ARE. That’s it, tho not easy, it’s simple.
***
I’m not normally cognizant of themes, but if I was here I would say this quote encapsulates it:
“And so true compassion requires that we say to them, ‘you must take the time you need, but the world tumbles on regardless, and if you take all the time you want your life will not be the same when you return.’”
So where You say the following, I would think that thinking ABOUT the before times is waste of effort, right?
“To prefer the before times is a mark of terrible unseriousness.”
***
“We have created an entirely new epistemology of public health science in the past couple of years, one that is somehow not a branch of medicine or biology but of public relations. Its vectors are not pathogens but perceptions. It tracks not the spread of disease but the spread of blame.”
Haha! Right You ARE! Never THOUGHT of it that Way, but true.. true…
***
“Whether it should reawaken is angels dancing on the head of a pin, a trolley problem, a dorm room pass-the-bong puzzler. It can’t be answered and doesn’t matter.”
Hm.
***
“Time only spins forward, for good and for bad, even during a pandemic, even when THIS. IS. NOT. NORMAL. No time stays special forever, and people like living life. It’s no more complicated than that.”
Yah. One-a those ‘Is really simple, but hard-ta DO’ thingies.
***
“And while we will light the candles and whisper at the memorials and teach the children, in time the victims will seem no more real than those of Genghis Khan. That’s just how history works.”
Weeeel, I’m first generation after the genocides. If second generation after can forget them, that’s on THEM. How many generations should genocide be REMEMBERED, and the horror be CONTEMPLATED? I’d say as long as societies are still PRACTICING it around the world, in recent memory.
***
“central message of Kazuo Ishiguro’s brilliant, underappreciated The Buried Giant, that even genocide succumbs in time to the relentless disintegration of human memory, and that nothing endures the passage of generations and the fog of time.”
See above.
***
“They tell me that forgetting is not a biological error, but a survival mechanism, that we are not meant to remember forever that which we could not really endure in the first place.”
Interesting philosophical/biological point. To me, anyway.
***
“That’s where we live, between our feeling hearts that see every life and death as sacred and our thinking minds that can't help but render all of it ordinary over time.”
The more I look, the more I sense that the feeling hearts have become a vestigial organ. Not just in me, I assure You.
***
“That was another lesson of 9/11, that there is no such thing as constant vigilance, that the concept is a contradiction in terms. Abnormal becomes normal. Life goes on.”
That’s a bug. A dangerous CHOICE to make these days in particular, right? Can’t say ‘In My Humble Opinion’ on this one.
Two responses to my first post as a subscriber.
Your excellent post made me think (constantly) of one of my favorite poems, Auden's Musee des Beaux Arts. Great pairing of poem and painting, too. http://english.emory.edu/classes/paintings&poems/auden.html
My mother died at the beginning fo the pandemic (March 20th, 2020) not of Covid. We dad a very small family memorial that summer, and then I commissioned a video tribute from all the people she had touched at the hospital where she worked. It made me feel better and was fairly easy to do.
Be careful when you get the booster. For the first 10-14 days you'll be significantly more vulnerable to COVID than you were before you got it. Then the protection kicks in.
Well said. Thanks.
I'm so sorry for your loss - I too love a person who "extracts a cost to be close to and then repays that cost with rare and complicated gifts of personality"—the best kind of person, really.
And thank you for the breath of fresh air on COVID restrictions. I'm higher risk than many, and have also diligently followed all of the precautions, while cautiously trying to ease back into normal life...but to me, both extremes are making it so hard on the rest of us. Those who refuse to take any precautions limit my and others' ability to engage in any semblance of normalcy, while those who push for more and more restrictions quite literally do the same.
It was extremely funny to me that when I was browsing twitter when news of T H E O M I C R O N V A R I A N T broke and The Palmer Report of all people one was one of the only non-science accounts on there making the case for remaining calm, waiting for more research to be done because most variants peter out, etc.
It's crueler in that the same feeling hearts that demand the world stop in one moment, flip, dissipate, distract, repel, attract in response to the world over the next few. We are blessed that the world is sufficiently stable and repetitive to re-stir our hearts again down the road.
Thank you for writing this. One thing I genuinely worry about with this stuff is the mask effectively never going away, especially during the winter, for people who work public facing service jobs. I see people on social media who have work from home jobs and never leave the house tweeting at Gov Hochul demanding a new mask mandate despite the vaccine passport in place. Meanwhile I have worked and worn the mask during work for forty hours a week through almost the entire pandemic, lost my job during the second NY lockdown and had to take the bus to Jersey to work. Now thanks to the vaccine passport I can enjoy my job again, but I feel for workers on the West Coast where the mask mandate resumed, regardless of vaccine status, during the delta variant. I would loathe to see a two tiered system emerge in the big liberal cities, where one class of people wears a mask for two seconds while going into a bar or restaurant to enjoy themselves, while another class waits on them wearing a mask for their entire working day, forty hours a week forever.
Interesting, this is such a regional thing.
I live in Nevada. We had a full-ish lockdown for probably 3 months. Thing is, this was partially voluntary: the Strip shut down before the government stepped in. After that, we had capacity constraints. Restaurants were capped at 50% capacity, despite them looking pretty darn close to full. We've also had a mask mandate the whole time, though many of these masks sit below the nose, or even below the chin. I've never seen a vaccine passport, and I've only had to present my card at optional workplace visits. Nowadays, it seems like every restaurant and public event is packed.
And this is in a state with Democratic governor, two democratic senators, and a democratic legislature.
I don't have any grand conclusions here, other than that maybe NY went uniquely crazy over this stuff.
I'd also like to add that I fully support any mandate that makes the Nets worse.
First let me say that was a beautiful tribute to your friend.
Second, because my position on COVID-19 sounds like it's almost exactly Freddie's, I want to note that it's a real shame that the pandemic stopped being personal and became so political. In many ways this whole thing was a story about millions of personal tragedies but also amazing human resilience and ultimately a story about countries all across the globe sciencing up a solution. It's a beautiful mixture of all the things that make life so horrifying and so wonderful. That could've been the Covid-19 story.
But instead, we said "fuck it, let's culture war this thing!"
Freddie, just have to thank you for your writing, as a long-time liberal who has been seeing what you're seeing, but who could never express it so well.
What's badly needed are health authorities who aren't politically compromised. Fauci is compromised -- both in reality and also in public perception. The fact that Biden keeps clinging to him (apparently for no better reason than petty in-group loyalty) is just contributing to the sense of confusion, distrust, and chaos.
I lost my best friend over this time period who died in January 2021 (not COVID). I had a virtual Mass said in her memory that was not much comfort. Thank you for expressing what many of us likely felt losing people during this period.
I read about places in the U.S. where not masking is treated like smoking, and it seems dreadful to me. Online I see a lot of people being outraged if they see people unmasked. I've had the shots & booster and keep a mask handy for the federal buildings (like the USPS) that require them. But I live in the South and most people don't mask except where required. We are outside a lot, maybe that helps. Schools were open all during 2020-2021 w/o masks. Children are seated further apart and ventilation systems improved. Children have after-school sports outside w/o masks. Life has been fairly normal and people are not tormented by the "Praetorian guard of busybodies" (This line was wonderful). Plus a really good college football season and MLB season have kept spirits up. Life does not need to be as constrained as it is in some places.
What I've come to hate, more than anything, is coming to see how this "Praetorian Guard of busybodies" lives in a life inside me, a life that works through me. You can call it a totalizing drive toward social domination; you can call it the "spirit of Enlightenment"; you can call it bullshit and say it's not there. But it's there. Waiting with a pulsating, bright-orange glow.
It kills me that people act like a world where you just sit inside on Zoom all day and get everything delivered to your door was possible. I can't think of anything which typifies the bourgeois nature of today's liberalism more than that. It's as if many of them literally think everyone works an office job and the people making, building, and delivering everything simply don't exist. It's no wonder this attitude caught on like wildfire in Manhattan and other urban liberal enclaves. They are the poster children for this kind of thinking.
I hate even talking about COVID. Two years of arguments has been enough for three lifetimes.
Have you watched The Leftovers? I'm nearly done with season two of three. There's a cult that wears white and doesn't speak and smokes and follows people around ominously and their whole thing is "we are a living reminder" of what happened. They don't want people to move on; they refuse to let people move on, sometimes in horrific, cruel fashion. One of its members lost her mother the day before the worldwide event that the show is premised on, and she's resentful of the fact that her loss has been subsumed.
I think the resentment, or at least the bewilderment, of the world going on is nearly universal with any major loss--or even a good life-changing event, like the birth of a child. When one's inner life is radically altered, the observation of "normalcy" in the world is an affront. We are all precious; we are all insignificant.
This was a beautiful piece.
ALL CAPS are ITALICS.
TYTY, for this FINE essay, Sir Freddie. :) Sorry so long. Didn’t plan to get so philosophical, and mebbe should-a concentrated more on the present difficulties. Mind just didn’t go down that road tho.
I understand that most all are concerned about this new Omicron variant. Best wishes to all.
Me? I go by the so-called scientific recommendations. Getting booster tomorrow. ALWAYS wear mask because I (almost) NEVER go out. Just my lifestyle before, during, and after. Hasn’t changed ‘cause-a the pandemic. That’s just me. Being retired has advantages, I admit.
Don’t concern myself too much with what other people do. That’s just me.
But whole entire THING, to me, falls into category “what-i-can’t-control.” I would prefer to live, make choices in the hope. But COUNT on it? Memento mori, right? Said before I’m extremely WEIRD, but I make sacrifices for inner tranquility, which comes in handy sometimes. Especially LATELY.
The author’s comments in double-quotes:
***
“Maybe Omicron really is ‘the big one,’ but they’ve said that about every last development in this endless story, so how would we ever know?”
‘Truer words were never said,’ right?
***
“And while they want you to mask up and vaccinate and obey other rules, what’s much more important to them than regulating your behavior is that they let you know that you don’t feel the right way about Covid.”
Weeeel, like I ‘said’ in comments to Your previous, why does it even REGISTER what ‘they’ say. How does what ANYone says, including this right here, have ANY effect on who You fundamentally BE. True, if requires a tough choice. Choice isn’t to ignore, but to KNOW. Know who You ARE. That’s it, tho not easy, it’s simple.
***
I’m not normally cognizant of themes, but if I was here I would say this quote encapsulates it:
“And so true compassion requires that we say to them, ‘you must take the time you need, but the world tumbles on regardless, and if you take all the time you want your life will not be the same when you return.’”
So where You say the following, I would think that thinking ABOUT the before times is waste of effort, right?
“To prefer the before times is a mark of terrible unseriousness.”
***
“We have created an entirely new epistemology of public health science in the past couple of years, one that is somehow not a branch of medicine or biology but of public relations. Its vectors are not pathogens but perceptions. It tracks not the spread of disease but the spread of blame.”
Haha! Right You ARE! Never THOUGHT of it that Way, but true.. true…
***
“Whether it should reawaken is angels dancing on the head of a pin, a trolley problem, a dorm room pass-the-bong puzzler. It can’t be answered and doesn’t matter.”
Hm.
***
“Time only spins forward, for good and for bad, even during a pandemic, even when THIS. IS. NOT. NORMAL. No time stays special forever, and people like living life. It’s no more complicated than that.”
Yah. One-a those ‘Is really simple, but hard-ta DO’ thingies.
***
“And while we will light the candles and whisper at the memorials and teach the children, in time the victims will seem no more real than those of Genghis Khan. That’s just how history works.”
Weeeel, I’m first generation after the genocides. If second generation after can forget them, that’s on THEM. How many generations should genocide be REMEMBERED, and the horror be CONTEMPLATED? I’d say as long as societies are still PRACTICING it around the world, in recent memory.
***
“central message of Kazuo Ishiguro’s brilliant, underappreciated The Buried Giant, that even genocide succumbs in time to the relentless disintegration of human memory, and that nothing endures the passage of generations and the fog of time.”
See above.
***
“They tell me that forgetting is not a biological error, but a survival mechanism, that we are not meant to remember forever that which we could not really endure in the first place.”
Interesting philosophical/biological point. To me, anyway.
***
“That’s where we live, between our feeling hearts that see every life and death as sacred and our thinking minds that can't help but render all of it ordinary over time.”
The more I look, the more I sense that the feeling hearts have become a vestigial organ. Not just in me, I assure You.
***
“That was another lesson of 9/11, that there is no such thing as constant vigilance, that the concept is a contradiction in terms. Abnormal becomes normal. Life goes on.”
That’s a bug. A dangerous CHOICE to make these days in particular, right? Can’t say ‘In My Humble Opinion’ on this one.