Is it just me? It feels like 2023 has been a slog so far. I’m pretty certain it isn’t just me, because as I look around, everyone looks like they are struggling. Life is full of struggles, but I don’t remember them being so palpable around most people most of the time like now. We strive and yearn and wait. Like Holy Week.
If you’re at all like me, every so often you’ve watched coverage at the time or a documentary later about some great disaster, one that has taken many lives in horrific circumstances. You might have wondered — I have, anyway — about how or whether families and friends ever found out what happened to some of the victims. If you think of Hiroshima, or the tsunami of March 11, 2011, or even the events of September 11, 2001, you suspect — no, know — that there are people who died whose fates will be forever unknown to anyone this side of the Pearly Gates.
We’ve all just about had it with hearing of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the organism that produces the disease called COVID-19. But, sadly, we’re not done with it yet, nor it with us, nor are we likely to be anytime soon.
Years ago, though in living memory, a phrase was coined. “Too big to fail” meant an institution is of such significance that the government must bail it out no matter what amount of incompetence, mismanagement, or pure corruption has put it at risk. In the intervening decade or two, the meaning of that phrase (along with the meaning of very nearly everything else) has softened. It’s now “too big to go against,” meaning anything whose shortcomings it would be inconvenient to mention.
I see it on the faces of everyone I talk to. The war wearied look of two years and three months since life changed. As we peer into a fall in which COVID continues to roar along and many I know who had dodged it are now catching it, life-February-2020-style feels more distant than ever.
Where did everybody’s favorite Snailcast go in May? The boys talk about that and some of the big news that happened during the last month, including the Supreme Court leak, the tragic Uvalde mass shooting and the political winds ahead of this year’s mid-term elections.
It started before the pandemic, but the pandemic let it take root and become the norm. We don’t often have funerals any more, at least not religious services in which we mourn the departed and beg God to welcome our dead friend or relative into the splendor of eternal Heavenly life. Instead, the obituary now frequently ends with “A celebration of life will take place at a later date.”
The phone call came exactly when I needed it. It was Bob Bernstein, with whom I’d never before spoken, calling from Rhode Island. “You haven’t been online, so I figured you might be having a problem,” he said. Indeed I was.
This is getting uglier and uglier. The evidence continues to mount that in the early days of the current pandemic Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Dr. Francis Collins, at the time the director of the National Institutes of Health, took extraordinary action to suppress the idea that SARS-CoV-2 originated in a Chinese laboratory.
Get ready to read something unpopular. New York late last year and now the federal government are giving preferential treatment to non-white, non-Asian people for scarce COVID-19 treatments. On the face of it, it’s an outrage.