@chrislhayes.bsky.social had a good bit tonight about "are you better off than you were four years ago" and so many people cannot rationally answer that question because we've collectively memory-holed the incredible trauma of what we all went through in 2020
Millions of people died, and maybe some of them wouldn't have if the dude in charge hadn't been so devoted to pandemic denial out of fear that the pandemic was going to hurt his numbers
I have, at least some of you know, been Through Some Shit these past six years and I understand the desire and need to just block stuff out of your mind and keep moving forward but it's like we all just decided to forget about a world war or something, it's crazy
I remember so vividly the sense I had of death as an anthropomorphized creature stalking us all, in that spring and summer of 2020. The endless sirens, the empty streets. That happened! It was a real thing we all experienced to one degree or another!
Every single one of us has our story, of what that time was like. My father was dying (though I didn't fully understand this at the time), and also I was in a long distance relationship that suddenly got put on hold, and maybe getting on an airplane was a death sentence? It was a weird fucking time.
I have an exercise bike in my apartment that I never use, but I can't get rid of it because I remember what it was liked to be trapped inside in 2020 for endless weeks and I just keep thinking, what if that happens again
Oh God, the denial and lies and delusion.
And the cheery support for medical people (clapping at 6 pm, was it?) and supermarket folks. Advice on handwashing, and gargling.
It all happened.
Someday, they'll do a movie about it.
This right here took so much effort not to flip everyone off as I was leaving my shift.
Simultaneously doing absolutely nothing to improve the situation for us in any material way, then hanging us out to dry, repeatedly, any time we asked for anything more than pizza parties or clapping.
In 2020, I was trapped in a plush McMansion with my angry abusive wife as our marriage disintegrated.
Now, I live in a 750 ft² brick house in the barrio with Otto, next door to my sister & her husband.
I'm better off, and Otto seems happy!
Back around summer of 2020, I listened to an interview with a historian who was talking about how the 1918 flu pandemic was a huge world-altering event yet there were basically no novels, plays, films etc. about it. Then she said that having been in a pandemic herself she now understood why
My wife was once involved in a research project, 25+ yrs ago, interviewing people who recalled the 1918 flu pandemic. There were still some people in their 80s or 90s then, who recalled the experience, to get some interesting qualitative data, but I think few if any really wanted to talk about it.
I still jump when I hear sirens at night. Being stuck inside a tiny one-bedroom apartment for weeks and weeks, while West Coast friends sent me texts urging me to get out more and I wanted to scream, "You have backyards! You have cars! I am living through the worst zombie apocalypse movie ever!"
God the cars. I was happily car free in Boston area the year prior and suddenly it was so trapping. Then the chip shortage and the bike shortage....I'd climb out onto the fire escape to get fresh air
there were no refrigerated trucks full of corpses
there were no mass graves
get back to work
Republican addendum: Anthony Fauci should be executed for crimes against humanity
Why there are so few books about the 1918 influenza pandemic imo: Too horrible for most to remember. My grandmother talked about those dark days. Don’t forget.
we still haven't had a even a moment to deal with any of that trauma, as it has been a nonstop shitshow since Trump started his campaign in 2015, and the stress and terror will not ease up even a bit unless/until he loses the '24 election
For New Yorkers specifically (and I assume this goes for any major city around the world as well), we never got a chance to process, grieve and memorialize the tens of thousands of early COVID dead we saw spilling out of refrigerator trucks.
if we had just remembered what little we had learned from 1918 we could have continued things like church and school that are actually important and lessened the overall societal impact that we're still dealing with
and for folks who hate church it is actually important to the people who really take it seriously
the whole "you can get groceries but you can't go to church" shit was bad and stupid
The same thing happened with the Spanish Flu pandemic in 1918. It got almost entirely erased from public memory - it was "rediscovered" decades later. Even memoirs by politicians and the surgeon general barely mentioned it. O_o
I learned just last year that one of my father’s brothers died from the “Spanish” flu. I knew he had died in childhood & before my dad was born, but not that it was in the flu epidemic.
My theory is that it was too big - something that could be anywhere, and we could do very little against it. And the scale - millions of people is a hard number to understand.
It was just too ubiquitous, too big to grasp, which is itself a sort of existential horror.
It's a lot of work to put together an administration, and a lot of it can't really be logistically/legally done until after the election is fully certified. I once helped with building whitehouse.gov on an insane timeline. Then there's inauguration planning, etc. Timeline is too short, if anything
yeah I was on the magnetometers at Obama's 2nd inauguration and it was honestly impressive that they even got it thrown together at all… also I bet if the transition were slightly longer, the 2nd Trump impeachment would've been successful. "Well, he's already out of office…" provided a lot of cover
If we got rid of the electoral college, the the new president could be sworn-in on Dec. 1 with acting cabinet secretaries in place until they get confirmed.
Worse than pandemic denial. Active political strategy was "well if we ignore it, it'll hit Dem states the worst!"
And people still say there is no difference between Biden and Trump, or Clinton and Trump.
There's a lot of fatalism when we talk about the pandemic, oh it was a curveball, unpreventable. Maybe so.
But the fed response was objectively bad! Newsom had to trigger the first shelter-in-place! We had months of warning! Hospitals rejected masking! Liberate Minnesota!
