Things are starting to feel okay. Maybe it’s just blatant ignorance for the rest of the world or things got so bad that even slight improvements seem like leaps for humanity. Nonetheless, things are turning around.
Things? What are things? What do I mean? Why just now, today, are “things” starting to be, okay?
I wish I could tell you. But it feels nice. The sun is out. Vaccines are rolling out. Life is slowly, very slowly returning to normal. At this rate, we might see a renaissance-type return to form in the fall!
This has been the common rhetoric of the privileged person for the past two weeks. Their lives seem to be improving drastically, therefore everyone’s lives are improving drastically, right?
I can’t blame them for enjoying the warmer weather and distant dream that COVID-19 will go away with the change of the seasons. Hell, I fall into that trap just about daily. It’s been a relentlessly long year full of grief, sorrow, pain and boredom. Moments of bliss that allow us to escape from that reality are tiny miracles.
Others aren’t so lucky to experience the same. Daunte Wright was murdered during a traffic stop. Racial injustice in America has seen little to no reform. Venezuela is still crippled from the long-lasting damages of COVID-19. Immigrant families are still being handled and processed in cages at the U.S. border. Nigerian conflict refuses to cease. The Yemen famine persists. Millions are hungry, homeless and left to rot in a persisting pandemic. Even in America.
Things are not returning to normal. Things aren’t starting to feel okay. The damages of the past year are affecting life far beyond comprehension. And don’t get it twisted, I’m happy for those who have had life ease up on them over the past few weeks; they deserve it just as much as everyone else. But let’s not act like this is a universal trope.
People will feel this past year’s pain for many more to come. Lives were uprooted from the pandemic. And for some reason, a lot of people lack the empathy to vocally realize that. The classic “if it didn’t happen to me, it didn’t happen at all” mentality is persisting.
COVID-19 and 2020 were traumatic events. We are just now entering stage one of the grief cycle. Denial.
Deny all they want; though the world may not be getting worse, it isn’t getting better. It’s time for those who want to perpetuate the narrative that life is returning to normal to take a step back and make a profound realization. Life is not getting better Things aren’t starting to feel okay.
The least that they can do is not shove it in those whose lives were ruined from the pandemic faces.’ The only way to progress through the grief cycle, to actually have things return to normal, is to accept the obvious.
Life is far from okay and that’s okay. The sooner we realize that the sooner we can start making real progress.
Carter Kolpitcke can be reached at [email protected]