Maybe We Can’t Make It

The first weekday morning of the year almost always sucks. It’s freezing cold and you are thrown back into a routine that you never liked in the first place. I worked straight through the last two weeks, but with a little bit of family time, having Saturday off since I worked on Monday. . .blah blah. Today I woke up feeling like sleeping for a thousand hours. The family got started late and everyone is in a mood. But this all feels quasi manageable. I’ve been struggling with a car door that has a super loose sealing on it. When it’s real cold it doesn’t open. But this morning it opened.

When we arrived at daycare there’s all the new parents, there’s the classroom changes, there’s the items people forget their kids need cause everyone is trying to get back into it after some days of vacation. There’s confusion, there’s more people than usual. And there’s an incredibly contagious variant of COVID19 floating in the air. I don’t know, maybe 15, 20 people probably have it. Maybe its parents and the kids will never get it, maybe the kids won’t get it. But I’m guessing a lot of rooms will get shut down in the coming two weeks, a lot of schools will get shut down. But right now I’m bringing my youngest daughter to her new daycare room. I meet the teacher and once Naomi sees what is going on, she starts to scream. Naomi won’t scream for a reasonable amount of time. It’s 100% possible she is still screaming now, an hour later as I write this. As Naomi is screaming at what many observers would think is the top of her lungs but I fucking know better, I am thinking about the great resignation. I don’t want to resign from my job, I quite like my job and I feel really positive about the inroads I am making at the job. But, I’m in a room full of masked parents running around dropping their kids off in 6 degrees above zero weather. I’ve been listening all morning to a podcast about fascism in the United States. We are three days away from marking the one year anniversary of an attempted coup against our government. We aren’t going to make it. Is there going to be someday in my life or my daughter’s life where the last edition of the New York Times is printed, or news becomes completely managed by the ruling party? Will there be elections every four years for the rest of my life? Will there be a Civil War? We are tearing apart and a fatal disease didn’t bring us together. Population wise at this moment, the Republican Party can’t want a fair fight. A fair fight means losing. And losing has no grace now. We don’t have a compelling punch your chest reason to stay a country. It’s freezing out. These children wonder why their teachers wear masks and their parents don’t, unless they are in stores. The older children are wondering why some adults never wear masks, even when they’re asked to. I can’t tell my children how strange this is, because for them, the pandemic now takes up at least 40% of their lifespans. Income inequality hasn’t been this high since the 1920s. My daughter’s other boot is still down in the classroom she’s leaving, I’ll bring it up, that will not stop her crying. 1,000+ die everyday in this country. 80 million Americans remain willfully unvaccinated. There’s people who die not from COVID19, but from waiting in a hospital for a bed while people with COVID19 stuff emergency rooms. We aren’t in this together. We die alone. Our babies will face worse. It’s not their job to solve it. The richest companies in the world hawk products that make teenage girls feel worse about themselves. They print money. Everyone is getting COVID. Unemployment is down, homelessness is up. Things are looking up if you don’t look down. People yell on twitter. We all want to focus on the hyper local and part of it is because we can’t beat the Koch Brothers internationally. The billionaires you look at are pulling up the ladders they always denied were helpful or valuable to them. I will buy $300 worth of ads from Mark Zuckerberg today. I will finance teenage girls feeling worse about themselves so that you feel compelled to go to a trivia night that I think might actually make you feel better about yourself. We are on this overheating planet and it is freezing and it’s the first business day of 2022 and every daycare parent is putting their kid’s shit into a new cubby thinking that they might be picking it all up in a week when the kids start coughing, when the teachers start calling out, when the world starts closing up. But today, you bring the boot upstairs from the old classroom. You see your daughter is still crying. You already comforted her once and got her reset and playing with a new friend. That set the teacher Eva in a good direction. If you go in again you just extend the crying. So you walk past quickly, her screaming floating on top of every other instrument in the morning daycare orchestra. You open the door to the cold wondering why you aren’t screaming too.