One of the most frustrating thing about this time politically is knowing that there are people who chose it and are gleeful about it. Yes, there are also people who are starting to have bitter regrets about choosing it, but still that they could have chosen it in the first place is very discouraging.
Yesterday I wrote about COVID reducing the work force. That temporarily gave some people better work options, and we are seeing a serious backlash against that now.
That backlash -- which I will get to at a different time -- is partly about a rejection to valuing people. That had been around for a while, but things that happened during COVID reinforced it.
I will also spend more time on dominator culture later, but one thing about it is that it works better if you have different forces that can play off of each other. I think that is because when you face it head-on it becomes very hard to maintain any illusions about how wrong it is. However, when you have capitalism reinforced by ageism or racism, it's like the different forces blunt the awareness.
Therefore, while there was always the capitalistic desire to get back to business as usual, the path to enabling that included Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick saying seniors were willing to die for it and white people becoming less vigilant about the virus as they found it was affecting Black and Latinx people more:
(Let me just throw in a reminder that racial disparities are rooted in structural inequalities in access to work opportunities, health care, and environmental stressors. So, that's an indictment.)
I am never not thinking about COVID, but I am thinking of it more now.
I have already been thinking about how having such an anti-vaccine person in charge of health, I expect COVID rates to rise and a worse than usual flu season that will probably also see spikes of measles. whooping cough, and other diseases.
That was in the back of my mind as I was putting on my mask before entering my mother's memory care facility Sunday.
I could get a lot more flak for mask wearing, but I do get some. Regardless, I was thinking that for all the things that I can't control I will not carry disease to my mother.
Then I had a flashback to a conversation I had with one of the workers, about how there is a COVID outbreak after every holiday.
Well, I had already noticed; that's why we were talking about it. Sure, it's kind of true with 4th of July, but you really see it around Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's.
It suddenly occurred to me that my mother is probably not going to outlive this holiday season.
There are things that could be worse about that. Her cognition has deteriorated a lot, and it could be around then anyway. There is a real way in which it could be a release and actually allow the start of some emotional healing.
It still makes me mad.
Maybe she would not be quite as deteriorated yet if she had not already been infected every year.
Losing her will be hard no matter what, but if instead of passing peacefully her passing is wracked with coughing or fever, I am going to be really angry about that.
For whoever it is who brings it back there each time, okay, the families that have the big gatherings without taking precautions may very well not even know my mother or have any reason to think about the effects on her. I have chatted with some of the other residents and sometimes their family members, but we don't all know each other.
Maybe they are okay with their loved one getting it; probably they just aren't thinking about the risks and ignoring that kind of information, but hey, maybe there is a part of them that wants the end hastened.
A problem with that is that while you can influence things, that is not the same as controlling them. In the same way that you don't control whether my mother gets it, you don't control whether other family members get it. You can't control whether the care staff gets it, leading to staff shortages that affect the quality of care.
Yes, back when it started old people died and Black and Latinx people died, but a lot of young people did too.
A lot of white people died.
A lot of essential workers died, with ripple effects beyond the grief of their families.
And the majority are apparently still in denial about it, because wearing a mask is itchy and having to think about other people sucks.
That commitment to denial (ignorance) and not caring is not something that can be harnessed to save democracy.
Related posts:
https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2024/12/wear-damn-mask.html
https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2025/02/im-not-swearing-at-you-this-time-but.html
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment