It's Been Two Years Since Society Collapsed and I Feel Fine
"When we refuse to suffer...your life gets boring and crazy."
Subscribe here to Calling Balls & Strikes!
Two years ago this week, COVID shut everything down. Things sucked for a real long time.
They’re a bit better now, what with the vaccines and all. But I can’t quite shake the state of dull dread that’s been a part of every day since March 2020, and is now essentially societal wallpaper.
I’ve read that quite a few people have nostalgia for the early days of the pandemic. That is not, and never will be, my experience.
Those were among the most shockingly bleak days of my life. They eviscerated my laughingly naive expectations of community, institutional competence, and many people’s basic humanity.
The socio-political events of the following two years haven’t brightened that perspective—though my emotional nerve endings have become so frayed that I’m far less susceptible to the shock of people (individuals and masses) letting us down. If anything, a healthy pessimism combined with a daily sense of gratitude has been the most successful formula for maintaining mental health.
I didn’t realize it on March 11, 2020, but my two older kids would not have meaningful in-person schooling for the next 18 months (there was a brief experiment with “Zoom in a room,” but if something is possible to be “less than worthless,” it was “in person-remote learning”).
I didn’t know refrigerated trucks filled with dead COVID victims would soon line the streets near my building for months. I couldn’t have expected to eventually get used to the incessant whine of ambulance sirens, the only thing that pierced the disquieting silence of a quarantined New York City.
And I couldn’t have imagined that two years later, New York City—my literal home and/or object of desire for basically my whole life—would remain unrecognizable compared to the “before times” and provide me with little to no comfort, most of days.
In the early-COVID months, like everyone else, we watched that “Tiger King” show (which really wasn’t all that good). With no live sports, I briefly got really into Korean baseball (sigh). I made “mixtapes” as both a coping mechanism and a time capsule. And while the tunes hold up, I’ve come to associate most of that music with an era I don’t care to revisit—and maybe never will.
As a sanity-protecting activity, my family coordinated with a local charity and took turns driving around Queens to deliver grocery bags of food to people who didn’t qualify for government relief. This fulfilled an altruistic wish to help those in need, of course, but also satisfied a selfish desire to not feel worthless.
Barely three months after the excrement hit the fan, I and every other New Yorker would briefly be living under a goddamn curfew—as the days of peaceful protests against the police murder of George Floyd turned into nights of nihilistic looting (largely committed by people who hadn’t been a part of the protests).
I reported from some of those protests, and one Tuesday night, standing in the middle of Union Square, I watched as a parade of disciplined peaceful demonstrators marched south, a column of police trailing in their wake. It couldn’t have been 10 minutes later that glass was breaking, and teenagers were helping themselves to designer jeans and electronics. That’s when I realized that where I was standing—one of the hubs of Manhattan—was a lawless zone.
Reporting what I saw, with video documentation, proved trickier than I thought. That’s because while few would admit it, we were in the midst of a moral panic.
The article I wrote, based on the things I saw, would sit dormant for weeks, eventually getting published well after the news cycle surrounding the events had passed. Saying things like, “rioting is wrong morally and counterproductive politically” was a legitimately controversial statement at the time. Though I also reported on unjustifiable police violence during the protests, it was strongly encouraged that I delete the videos of looting I had posted to Twitter, after it was made clear that some of the youngest and most “socially-informed” folks in the newsroom did not think it was journalistically ethical to post video of “protesters” destroying things to fulfill political objectives. (That position would be revised post-January 6, 2021.)
Then, the anti-cancel culture backlash came, and suddenly small government conservatives, free market “classical liberals,” and “politically tribeless” alt-centrists were calling for government intervention against “woke” ideas. Republicans happily answered the call.
Now in this, our dumbest timeline, cancellers on the left simultaneously claim “cancel culture” is not real, but also that canceling people—even for infractions that may have been committed in their youth—is both righteous, necessary, and basic accountability. And the cancellers on the right are using the force of law and government to impinge on the freedom to protest (unless you’re an anti-vaxx Canadian trucker), the freedom of association, and the freedom to discuss “divisive topics” in a public school—all in the name of protecting “free speech.”
Democrats incorrectly presumed that the activist left-flank of the party—which wanted to “defund the police” and establish racial essentialism as a form of social justice—spoke for the average Democratic voter. Only the political idiocy of Donald Trump—who falsely declared Georgia’s election fraudulent, thus discouraging Republican voter turnout in the state’s two Senate runoff elections—gave Democrats the win they needed to take the slimmest control of Congress.
Trump, the serially-bankrupt developer turned-game show host-turned President of the United States, spent much of 2020 laying the groundwork for his Big Lie. Then, after losing to the wholly uninspiring Joe Biden, the 45th president broke the previously-sacrosanct American tradition of “peaceful transfer of power” and incited a riot at the U.S. Capitol.
To this day, tens of millions of his followers believe the election was stolen—a ridiculous falsehood disproved by multiple Republican state election officials, and rejected summarily Trump’s own attorney general, vice president, and the 6-3 conservative-leaning Supreme Court (that includes three Trump appointees).
MAGA dead-enders lazily try to deflect all legitimate criticism of their disgraced loser hero as “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”
When it comes to MSNBC liberals’ blind devotion to the basic delusional beliefs behind “Russiagate”—Trump was basically Putin’s “Manchurian Candidate” puppet—the MAGAs have a point.
But after every “audit” has revealed nothing, after every galaxy brain conspiracy theory has been forgotten (like when Trumpists insisted “Benford’s Law” proved the election had been stolen), and after most of Trump’s most loyal enablers (Mike Pence, Bill Barr) have plainly and repeatedly said that the Big Lie is a big lie—nothing will change the minds of tens of millions of Trump supporters. This is a problem for the continued practice of democracy.
But wait! A safe, free, mass-produced-in-America vaccine arrived less than a year after the pandemic began! We were going to be free! And maybe with a little normalcy, everyone’s fried brains would begin to heal, and the constant shrillness of the culture war would at last, subside.
Then the two-headed right-wing populist panic—one insisting the vaccines were a Bill Gates-created microchip-installing poison, the other hysterically bleating that temporary vaccination requirements for indoor public places portended the coming of a global fascist new world order—left massive pockets of this country highly vulnerable to hundreds of thousands of avoidable deaths, and counting. A death toll of 100,000 was considered unthinkable at the start of the pandemic. Now nearly one million dead Americans are dead from COVID. Seems like this should be a bigger deal.
And the variants (first Delta, then Omicron) that snuffed out the extraordinarily brief windows of “normalcy” have made it difficult to trust that our current moment of low COVID infection rates and declining deaths will last much longer than a month or two.
Gas prices are surging. Inflation’s beating the shit out of consumers. There’s a still-painful supply chain shortage. Downtowns are still eerily empty.
And now a Russian despot is murdering women and children, as we teeter on the edge of an “international conflict.” (I won’t use the W-W word. Not yet.) As a young Gen-Xer, I’m part of what you might call the “Red Dawn” generation: young enough to be mistaken for a millennial, but old enough to remember the perfectly normal fear of a Soviet-U.S. nuclear conflict, and shortly thereafter, “the end of history”
So while this isn’t the future I imagined, the narratives are on the level of a dystopian, jingoistic 1980s’s Cold War B-movie.
When COVID upended our lives two years ago, I don’t know why, but I predicted it would take two years for something like “normal” to return. It was just an educated guess, based on very little education.
Two years later, I guess things are a little more normal, but not really. Things still mostly kinda suck, and there’s plenty good reason to believe they’ll get worse.
As viewed through my incredibly narrow lens, the most sane, rational evaluation of the current state of affairs in politics, media, and public health is…pessimistic.
I’m grateful for so many things, not least of which are the health of my loved ones and gainful employment—but also, winning the birth lottery to exist somewhere I don’t have to fear being murdered by a deranged Russian despot’s Cold War nostalgia.
The pandemic has humbled me like nothing ever has before. And, thankfully, in the few years before COVID, I finally began to commit to a lifetime of managing (rather than ignoring) my cyclical depression and chronic anxiety. Therapy, meditation, regular exercise, and discarding toxic professional and personal relationships have all helped the weathering of tragedy, betrayal, disillusionment, and the heartbreak of watching my kids robbed of years of childhood experiences.
Rather than letting all this shit weigh me to the floor, wasting precious moments of an all-too-brief lifetime, I choose to run toward it, confront it—then wash it off.
“Don’t Worry Be Happy” is a vapid lie.
I choose to follow the wisdom of the great, eccentric troubadour Jonathan Richman:
”When we refuse to suffer
When we refuse to feel
You're suffering more
And your life gets boring and crazy”