Because Our Kids Come From The Pandemic

Children of the depression were changed, they weren’t like their parents, and they weren’t like their kids. I think my daughters (4 and 1) are likely going to have similar relationships to this pandemic. They’ll have masks in their pocket throughout their lives. They’ll keep extra food somewhere weird (we keep it in the shower and we call the process ghostbucketing). I think we will all spend so much time in the coming years helping make sense of what this pandemic means to us. How it changed us. And we won’t be able to divide those changes from the social upheaval and realignment that we faced during the pandemic. Are you standing up the next time you can during the National Anthem? We don’t know exactly who we are as a country. And I don’t know how I relate to this country. I have so much hope for how this country can get better, can deliver better. Singing or not singing the National Anthem is a political act, and I don’t know if I’m ready to just do it cause everyone else is doing it which is where I’ve been at for years. I don’t really know who I’ll be when I get back out in person in a meaningful way. And I have no idea how big the memory of the pandemic will loom in our heads. I read that after the Spanish Flu everybody stopped talking about it, it didn’t show up in novels, it didn’t show up much of anywhere. I can’t see that happen. But maybe we will want to forget. We will force ourselves to pretend it didn’t happen. That’ll be a tragedy in and of itself, we have to learn from this, and we have to change.