COVID Ends with a Shrug. What Else Will?

I thought maybe there would be a parade?

Yay COVID Is Over, Sigh

We are still on our big trip – I write this in the airport in San Jose, Costa Rica, after three glorious months of outside, warm, animal-filled peacefulness. But back home, with schools now going on their March break, the big news is: COVID is over. Note the lack of an exclamation point. COVID is seemingly “over” in terms of us having to do anything to protect ourselves or one another unless we really feel like it – even in schools, despite under-five-year-olds not being vaccinated at all.

At the beginning of COVID, I felt like part of a story: the world was in a pandemic, and we had to DO things: stay home, learn Zoom, wear masks, wash our hands ten thousand times a day. It was frightening, but it felt pretty clear for an unknown situation. I made big statements like “Maybe we’ll relearn the concept of solidarity,” and “Maybe we’ll do something about inequality now that all the cracks are showing,” and “Maybe this will be a chance for a reboot.” But that did not last long.

I lost faith (and, for a minute, my actual mind) when the Ontario government took an August vacation despite having no honest plan for the impending return to school. I couldn’t believe it (I can now).

Public schools started weeks late, and they were never really given the promised ventilation and health measures they needed. Nothing was really done to address the shocking and painful wave of deaths in for-profit elder-care facilities. Hazard pay, which we had all agreed was only fair, vanished after three months without explanation. The Progressive Conservative government never did anything at all to protect factory workers, shipping centres, and other working-poor-people workplaces, and did nothing that wasn’t two weeks later than it should have been. They spent much of their time trying to steal protected land for a mob-run highway. And in the largest picture, we never even pretended to vaccinate the entire planet. We didn’t even actually try.

Public Health Messaging

The last society-wide clear message I heard was “flatten the curve” – the most impressively fast and targeted communication of a clear and important idea I’ve ever seen. As is normal in our society, we were never given the message to stand down on any of the health measures we’d put in: nobody wants to be responsible, maybe, if it turns out that groceries do need to be washed or left outside for a few hours. The hand-washing aspect was never cancelled, but became optional nearly everywhere. Hygiene theatre, costly and laborious, was never given permission to end – it just did.

From this point on, we were kind of on our own. We spoke to our friends to determine best practices as best we could. Some people kept it up hardcore, others eased up; there was no longer a “correct” strategy. It was no wonder to me that people started to choose not to mask, stopped feeling solidarity. Who even was the group we were supposed to pull together with? What if our own group had already been left out of the solutions?

Small Communities Can Do Things

Thankfully, I work in a small community – a school of about 300 humans of all ages – that is allowed to enact thoughtful protocols as needed, and is run by people who take safety seriously. We were not burdened by the impossible demands that public schools were: to somehow stay safe without access to windows or fresh air; to stay separated without room to do so. I love working in a small private school (despite the inequity of tuition) for these reasons: we are flexible and can be fluid. People can speak and be heard – and so can contribute. I will always seek to be part of small communities, and hope to find more of them.

My hope for real solidarity at any larger scale is really damaged, though. I think it’s clear that our government system is incapable of doing what we need (and hired) it to do. It is not accountable. It benefits from our fragmentation and separation. Citizens snarling at one another about incomplete and inconsistent COVID information works better for Doug Ford than actual cohesion would. He and his ilk prey on our most easily-manipulated tendencies and from the political confusion they generate.

We Surrender

Leaving Costa Rica today, we are masked and sanitizing hands and doing COVID tests in preparation for the flight. When we land in LA, we’ll be in the American experiment again for a while. And then when we return to Canada, apparently, there will be no rules.

It was my deep hope that I would return from this sabbatical to find COVID was over. I really, really hoped to never teach in a mask or on Zoom again – it is tiring and ineffective. But not like this. If I am able to teach without a mask again in September, it’ll be because we’ve decided “Fuck it, we’re tired of masks” – the most anti-social, anti-science course possible. I do not know how I’ll handle it. Will I wear a mask to prove this point? Will I just surrender to the consensus? I really don’t know. I hope that I will remember to keep my focus on the small communities I can affect, and inspire my students to do the same. That seems to be the best we can do.

COVID should end with a parade: ticker tape and trumpets and kissing in the streets. It seems it will end with a shuffling shrug as we all zombie-walk back to a fake new normal that will mean nothing. At this singularly important time in human history, at this crisis point before the full catastrophe of a hot Earth whose solution will demands full societal solidarity, sacrifice, and action, we could really just fail and lose.

Then These Videos

My friend Matt sent me John Stewart’s interview with David Wallace Wells, whose book The Uninhabitable Earth I listened to twice in a row and which played a big part in my own comic book How About a Nice Big Cup of Climate Grief (2019). Wells has remained on top of all further developments about the catastrophe, and somehow remains clear-eyed and involved (and he has kids, and he isn’t crippled by his grief, and his other reportage beat is COVID!).

Stewart brings the clarity he always brings to things, asking honest questions and demanding honest answers, thinking about things without partisan pettiness, maintaining his belief in humanity (e.g., giving oil industry CEOs the benefit of the doubt – something I haven’t been able to do). Their conversation took me up and down mountains of emotional reactions, informed and nudged my take here and there, and left me feeling really sad but glad that honest conversations are happening now.

How About a Nice Big Cup of Hope?

And then I saw a video by Hank Green, one of YouTube’s wonderful and intelligent Green brothers, called “Is It All Hopeless?” I’d been sitting firmly in this weird zone of both feeling solidly doomed, coming to terms with our failure, and also trying to help make the world better. I had been wondering how I can successfully fake hope for my students, when I get back. And then Hank Green points out, like a secular preacher, that we never know what is coming up, and that it is impossible to imagine what will actually happen, and that while we talk about feeling hopeless, we rarely act hopeless – we just keep trying. And that’s true, that feels right.

I don’t know how to feel. I guess I think – know – that bad things are coming – really bad and painful things like hateful nationalist reactions to the impending climate refugees, stunning levels of human suffering, and a shrinking of humanity. AND I think the only healthy thing I can do about any of it is to continue to witness the world’s beauty, and share ideas and approaches that my students can use as they keep love and beauty alive.

Messaging

Could we possibly spread the ideas needed for this awful transition as well as we spread “flatten the curve”? Could we start now preparing kids for a different future in a good way? We will need to learn to live with less and not covet more. We will need to learn to share our stuff with new people. We will need to unlearn the shitty, mean-spirited capitalism we’ve enjoyed the benefits of. We’ll need to learn to build systems we can respect, and then not game those systems. And we must undermine and defeat our tendency to elect big dumb lying bullies to “lead” us. That’s a lot. Let’s start spreading those things now.

The end of How About a Nice Big Cup of Climate Grief was my deciding to try and love the world as I mourn it. And now, three years later, I’m wondering if I can wrap my head around HOPE, too. I hope I can – which is in itself promising.

It’s an ongoing process, like everything else.

How are you doing with it?

Love,

Santa

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PS: I found this discussion on Jane Coasten’s The Argument podcast reasonable and informative re COVID. and the decision to stand down.

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