4/28
We passed a million-victim milestone today. Three million worldwide, which means that the US accounts for 1/3rd of all global infections. The Blue Angels and Thunderbirds roared overhead at exactly 2:00 to celebrate our valiant healthcare workers and I of course, nose buried in my screen, forgot about them coming.
Even as the world’s situation worsens and grows more complex, for me personally, it has been 8 days since my last fever and the last 4 days have been filled with a renewed energy and optimism. I dashed outside, camera in hand, then ran right back inside to get a mask. I felt briefly naked.
Back outside, I found my Italian-American neighbor, his Asian-American wife and their son on PA Avenue all with sad, sour expressions. Everybody else was smiling and animated. I asked him what the problem was, I could see that there was one from their faces. He said, just dealing with ignorance and intolerance Rick. I tried to make light conversation, but it wasn’t working. They turned home and though puzzled by their affects, I went about my day.
The day was warm and bright and I and my little camera wound through the Azalea Garden and north along the river. While sick, I’d missed the peak, but the cherry and crabapple trees are still gravid, bursting with flowers which will be gone soon. They are in the final throes of their floral pregnancy and the setting sun casts a poignant light on their final, spectacular demise.
Later this evening when Kara returned from her second day of work she told me that some asshole had told our Chinese/Japanese-American friend that this pandemic was her fault and that she should go back to China. The lady is a gentle, friendly MD child psychiatrist. She has done more healing, more good in this world than 1000 of the sort of bigot who verbally assaulted her in front of her son. What emboldens that sort of person to spew such filth?
The question is of course rhetorical. The day that racists marched through the bucolic academic village where Kara and I were married is seared in my brain, forever destroying our clearly naive illusion of Charlottesville as a place of enlightened tolerance and serenity. On the day when the president of the United States said that those marchers were good people, he lifted the rock and the filth crawled out. The next day, a gentle socially-conscious counterprotestor was murdered by these “very fine people.”
Many times since that day and particularly on the day when he insisted on calling COVID-19 the “Chinese virus” to the horror of his medical team, he emboldened the haters, the ignorant, the loud, ugly voices who’ll help him drown out any meaningful discourse on what China did wrong and more significantly, what we can learn from their mistakes and our own.
Today also, there are chunky dudes with ZZ Top beards and large phallo-compensatory semi-automatic weapons bouncing on their beer bellies trying to barge into the Michigan State Capital. If they ever thanked God they aren’t black, this would be the time. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has comported herself stoically in the face of armed insurrection and obvious brandishment.
5/13 Update. Whitmer is trying to ban this kind of firepower from her capital. So far unsuccessfully.
I wrote my friend and neighbor, just to tell her that we love her and honor both her cultural heritage, her personal contribution to our neighborhood and her professional contribution to our community. I felt a little better, but still angry and still powerless.
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