I still believe we can come out the other side of all of this a better society.

I’m parking this here because I want to expand upon it later. But I’ve been trying to find any positive outcomes of the tribulations that have landed on everyone due to the pandemic. I admit that  “finding the positive” in an event that has killed hundreds of thousands and upended the lives of 99.9% of the world’s population seems impossible. But I had to find something to hold onto, so…

If things hadn’t grounded to a halt in March we all would have kept on the non-stop treadmill of work/home/school/what-have-you; too busy to really take stock of the world around us. The routine so many of us undergo just to maintain daily living is relentless, isn’t it? And even though the pandemic added hours to my own work day, the steep decline of entertainment options outside the house left me with lots more free time to think about actually changing the things I see wrong around me than I used to.*

People who depend on the old way of doing things want to keep the status quo. The notion of taking advantage of this pause to make positive change is anathema to them. That’s why so many people in power are so desperate to ignore the health catastrophe around us, hoping that if they just open everything up, and fill people’s lives with their old routines, things will eventually get back to normal.

That’s just evil, since it’s built on the supposition that additional deaths are regrettable but necessary sacrifices for the greater good. That’s just not true. At all.

So let’s take advantage of what have become clearer lines of action to improve the world around us. This is a truly dark moment in U.S. history, but I believe we can emerge from this ordeal as a stronger community, focused on supporting each other rather than continue to throw up barriers between each other. I have to believe that.

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RANDOM THOUGHT: When news of the coronavirus started to break, I and so many others took no real note of it because we've lived through a number of similar health scares in just the last two decades, and each came and went without disrupting so many lives because the people n power did their jobs and kept on top of any outbreak. Virus outbreaks never seemed like a big deal—always landing in that mind frame of "I wish other countries had as good a system to keep people safe as we do so they suffered less during these things." It was simply unfathomable to me that the U.S. even had the potential to bungle a response top an outbreak as thoroughly as the current administration in power. But here we are.

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*I also am aware that people who are out of work right now are spending as much or more time looking for another job or just trying to eke out benefits from the antiquated unemployment system of whichever state they live in.