Chagal4's Blog

By now millions of words have been published and hundreds of pundits around the world have spoken and collected their first cheques of what is supposed to be a new year. For me it doesn’t feel like a new year. It feels like the old year is continuing. It’s the tenth of January and a toxic president still sits in the White House until January twentieth. The ghastly onslaught of Covid continues in spite of the arrival of vaccines. As one of my pals pointed out last week, the opioid crisis hasn’t gone anywhere. In short the problems that plagued 2020 are still very much with us. If there’s a light at the end of the tunnel we need to hope that it’s not the flick of a Bic with a crackhead taking a hit.

Most of us have lived through a year of fluctuating fear fuelled by warnings and cautions, rules, regulations, lockdowns and closures, distancing, masks, missing friends and family, Zoom calls and FaceTime , empty streets and weird humour on the internet to help us cope, bad t.v. and old black and white movies to marvel at…late night bingeing and books stacked and forgotten recalled and remembered . We got busy indoors, polished the skin off floors, dusted every nook and cranny, considered painting, ordered new sheets online, worked from home in neckties and gym shorts, turned pets into memes and insta-stars and tried hard not to be idiots. Alas…it was too hard for many. The almost daily evidence of ass-holes flouting common sense was disheartening , frustrating, even though it’s understandable that young people have energy, feel invulnerable and can’t bear being trapped in a house with parents or a small apartment with video games for days, it’s harder to understand fools who claim the pandemic is a hoax and refuse to wear masks or distance. The anti-vaxers who fear that micro bots can be injected with the vaccine in order to track their movements…as if anybody gives a damn where these trolls go on Saturday night.

And all of these things have changed us in ways we don’t fully realize yet. The way she see the world and each other has shifted. The ways we relate and communicate are different. There’s a lot of talk about how things will get back to “normal” when this is all over. “Normal’ depends on the circumstances. What we’re experiencing right now is “normal” for these circumstances and when the circumstances change there will be another “normal”. It will not be a “return to normal” .

In a way we have been trained for this. In the past sixty or seventy years we have seen and experienced huge changes at a speed never seen before. We had to learn to adapt to cultural, economic, social and political changes and perhaps the biggest surge in technological change ever known. These are no small adjustments and yet we endured, survived, learned, and kept on going.

Yes the pandemic is catastrophic , yes the events of last week in Washington are shameful, yes there is more to come on both fronts but perhaps no other generations in history have been better schooled to hang in and hang on.

Be smart, be safe, be well.

Blues, Jan. 10 2021

This entry was posted on January 10, 2021 at 5:26 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.