Covid Revisited
Flashback
The previous Wednesday, it had snowed.
It was rare to have that much precipitation at Christmas in northern Virginia.
It wasn’t just the initial snowfall but the fact that extremely cold weather followed and did not allow for melting other than to render hard surfaces more dangerous with ice.
For almost a week, the dull sky was mirror to the dull ground, but late Sunday, sun broke through in the afternoon.
It changed things.
We had stayed close to home during the bad weather, nursing an aging cat who had clearly reached his final week and had ceased eating.
With the approach of the solstice, it was a struggle not to think almost obsessively of the big marmalade tabby cat whose pet name was Solstice, and who had been a close companion and member of the household from the beginning of life on the farm.
Although imagining the kitchen and morning greetings without him was almost unthinkable, we came to accept his plight as he refused to eat, then became unsteady on his legs even for the brief span between his habitual couch and the door when he walked to relieve himself.
The brief note of hope brought by sun, turned our thoughts to something more cheerful. We had not visited the local winery in weeks, nor did drinking wine at coming holidays seem especially appealing this season.
The pandemic and its draconian restrictions on restaurants, bars and wineries had hamstrung them all, and drove them closer to ruin of what had, ten months earlier, been a vibrant industry.
There was only one other couple when we arrived, as we got glasses and chatted with the owner. It is remarkable how many trivial social pleasures had been abolished by state government edict, and left us and many like us, in isolation.
While enjoying the brief warmth on an outdoor deck, and without wind that had worsened much of the week, others arrived shortly after we did, perhaps with the same idea and similar motivation. It was only an hour until winery closing for the season.
Our point was to briefly refresh ourselves and support our winery neighbors, but we ended up sipping just lightly as the festive atmosphere associated with the season, was lacking. There is a unique and abiding sorrow associated with empty public places at the holidays. It is possible to generate one’s own seasonal cheer, but it comes only with more effort this year.
We gathered our bottle in a bag and pushed through the door out into the parking lot, knowing we might not see Eric or the others again.
Squinting against the brilliance of the sun, I could see someone approaching.
She seemed on the verge of angry tears and wanted to chat on the sidewalk as we were leaving, and asked about the Trump rally I had attended the previous week, about which I had told no one. It was one of the owner’s daughters who had invited us over that Sunday afternoon.
She followed our farm doings online and our daughter’s feed.
Apparently, my own daughter’s social media feed was full of angry condemnations at my attendance. It was curious that she felt free to publicly insult and criticize her father for endangering the welfare of his family by irresponsibly attending a rally in D. C.
Since her crazy public rants had become an irritation and annoyance, I had blocked her from viewing what I did post and had not followed her posts for months, nor was I responsive to her angry demands that I give up any expression of politics now that the election was over.
Her millennial attitude of monumental entitlement and self-righteousness paralleled that of a hulking and vociferous masked young man who stood in the back of a Metro car during the return trip to Virginia from the last Trump rally, publicly excoriating and condemning any rider without a mask, especially those with red caps on their heads.
It was fruitless to engage these sorts: the best that could be done was to move away, out of hearing and let them rant.
Some of us have given up trying to convince or compel a measured and reasonable approach to political discussions. The young seem to be a lost cause, and blamed all on the previous generation.
Perhaps they have always been lost, irretrievable.
As with the cat’s final days, the waning moments of the Trump era were painful to witness as both became incrementally weaker and less responsive.
***
Slow death is shocking to witness when it seems nothing can be done but to fret about how the process will eventually come to all. Combined with the pandemic, the bitter early winter weather and weeks on end without sunshine, these left no good reason for maintaining a productive and hopeful mood.
There seems a normal pathway that governs increasingly hopeless situations. In the end, it must be dealt with forthrightly. For some, life goes on and after the snow, Spring and light will return.
If it wasn’t excessive focus on public masking and the economically stifling lockdown, it was the Quixotic tilting after Climate Change as if it were in the power of any administration, any government or even of any species, to impact the weather and seasonal changes on an entire planet.
Like many attitudes among Progressives, there is an overbearing sense they feel as if they were personally anointed by God to correct and condemn those with other opinions. The source of their notions is within themselves: no power or rational thinking can sway this quasi-religious belief. To admit to authorities outside themselves, of any sort, explains much of what seems a disconnected series of philosophies and attitudes.
To abandon family and country, and abandon tolerance at least for those who choose to practice religion, but replace these with such values with a manic pursuit of diversity, exclusive and independent of professionalism, and the foolish quest to change the weather, will have a steadily corrosive impact.
Against this irritation, is an uncertain awareness that the old have always felt the same about the young.
It may be possible to subtract this elder bias from the consideration, but only with effort.
It was as if the slow slide toward socialism could be sensed but not seen, felt but not reversed and that inability to act led to an emotional flatness of affect that was novel and perpetually uncomfortable.
* * *
We had followed the vicissitudes and jubilations of that small winery for years.
It seemed to have always been there, with all the warmth that only a family business can provide.
They had been forced, due to economic pressure, to terminate their most experienced employee, a tasting room manager named Eric.
The business annually closed between the Christmas and MLK Holidays for inventory and to allow family time free of the pressures of dealing with the public, especially under the new restrictions. They had told all their staff to look for other employment by the week of Christmas.
It was not clear that they would re-open for the MLK Day holiday in 2021.
It was almost as if the county and state government had targeted small business for the purpose of bankrupting them, all while government employees alone, would continue on salary support. The point seemed to get everyone dependent on state supported welfare, and those not on welfare would be handcuffed by political favors in order to sustain their civil service income.
There would be no free markets, save those monopolies created and sustained by digital moguls.
By Monday December 22, the long delayed and litigated covid relief package passed through Congress. In return for six hundred dollars for each American citizen, Sudan was awarded seven hundred million, and provisions were made for other foreign nationals while taxpaying Americans went unemployed.
It was unclear why this was happening.
There was no vaccine on the horizon for the national pandemic of political fraud and hypocrisy, except the fact that the worst offenders are as ancient as the marmalade tabby, and their time will come.
* * *