War
My friend Susan posted this on Facebook. “If only I could share this glass of water with thousands of Ukrainians…oh how I wish I could.” And this: “My heart breaks every day for the Ukrainians.” When I wake up my first thought is the bathroom, then Zelenskyy, then coffee. After the first sip I think about killing Putin. Then, like Susan, I feel helpless, unable to do anything more than send money to the Red Cross for aid to Ukraine. Not a good way to start the day. The war is suffocating, and we’re not even in it, unless you count the extra dollar or two we’re paying at the pump, one of many stresses that have infected our lives over the past two years.
Pandemic
Yesterday, March 11, marked the second year since WHO announced that we were at the beginning of a pandemic. By then thirty-one Americans had died. On March 11, 2020 this conversation took place in DC: "Is the worst yet to come, Dr. Fauci?" asked Rep. Carolyn Maloney, the committee chairwoman. "Yes, it is," Fauci replied. He explained that the U.S. was seeing more cases from both community spread and international travel.
"I can say we will see more cases, and things will get worse than they are right now," Fauci said. "How much worse we'll get will depend on our ability to do two things: to contain the influx of people who are infected coming from the outside, and the ability to contain and mitigate within our own country."
The virus had by then infected more than 1,000 people in 40 states. At least 31 people in the U.S. had died from COVID-19, most of them in Washington state.
"Bottom line," Fauci said, "it's going to get worse."
Schools closed. Professional sports unceremoniously ended their seasons. Restaurants shuttered. No one went to work. Public transportation stopped. We hosted a one-day-a-week class for our granddaughter Isla and her friend Ella who were trying to learn through Zoom, a software classroom that allowed teachers to see and talk to students while trying to mimic electronically what they did in the classroom.
The Diamond Princess, a cruise ship, was held at sea for nine days while Trump tried to figure out what to do with it and several of its infected passengers. He didn’t want them to come ashore because he rejected adding the passengers to America’s Covid sick list. (Two years later. Almost a million have died; eighty million reported cases.)
Covid is still with us and may be for years to come. New cases and deaths are dropping, but the US still experiences over a thousand deaths a day. My friend Frank Guillen was one of those. Changing laws regarding masking, disinformation from the government, discomfort and inconvenience in our daily lives, especially for those with young children became part of an uncomfortable routine, a stress that in worst cases led to violence.
Inflation
We’re going through the highest rate of inflation in forty years. With the oil and gas embargo from Russia, gas prices have risen to levels never seen before. People who were living on a financial shoestring now find themselves in even choppier straits. The following is a post from Next Door, a community messaging forum. It isn’t about gas. It’s about behavior, the reaction to stress.
The Legacy of Donald Trump
January 6, 2021. Trump’s minions stage a coup. The worst attack against the United States Government since the Civil War, a criminal enterprise authored by TFG. And if that wasn’t bad enough, the lies that it never happened or that it was, as the Republican Party believes, “normal political discourse”, has taken root in Washington, in red states, becoming a centerpiece of the new Republican party, now referred to in liberal circles as the GQP”, as conspiracy theories from Q-Anon believers have taken center stage, removing any vestiges of the thoughtful intelligent fragments of what were once believed to be part of the Republican Party.
And walking side by side with the new Republican party are the right wing extremists, who are embraced by such walking minerals as the hopelessly stupid Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gosar, Lauren Boebert, and so many more who believe that they reflect true America rather than the fringe morons that embrace both their lies and stupidity. They conveniently blame immigrants for the very issues that they cause. Imagine this. Greene accuses Democrats as “communists” as she speaks at a forum where participants give hearty cheers to Putin. You can’t make this stuff up, folks. No moral bottom has been reached yet, only because we never believed that the Trumpies would go so far down…and continue…and continue…
BTW. Here’s a chart illustrating extremist events in the US over the last eighteen years. Trump’s desecration of the office of the Presidency begins at the same time the chart reaches for the sky.
Simply put, that so many of our fellow countrymen believe that a man who ridicules the disabled, speaks ill of deceased war heroes, has sexual escapades with porn stars while his wife is giving birth, and authors thousands and thousands of lies is a “great leader.” And those of us who don’t find that attractive are “haters” and “libtards” Stressed is what and who we are.
A Modest Proposal
So we’re all under stress. Lots of it. How we manage it is up to us. For Trump, a local psychologist scheduled classes for citizens who found his stewardship intolerable. So, one solution is therapy.
Another is to limit exposure. One half hour of news a day, whether TV, internet, whatever. Don’t cheat.
Another is a more proactive approach—doing something unrelated to the external stimuli that bring us stress. I volunteer twice a week at the Men’s Shelter in Berkeley, delivering doughnuts or serving breakfast to the homeless. On another day I deliver groceries for the Berkeley Food Pantry. I’m not looking for kudos. Doing this gives me pleasure. It’s a selfish enterprise. I do it for myself.
At least three days a week I hike/walk five miles in the East Bay hills. I feel better when I come back than I did when I left. I’m busy on the days I don’t hike—reading, playing guitar, gardening, working on images from my photo library. I dust, clean toilets, vacuum carpets, wash windows. I’m grateful for all the physical activity I’m able to do, not just because at the age of 75 I can still do it, but because cleaning, gardening, making my home look better makes me feel better, too.
I’m an optimist. I believe that things will get better. “Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well,” Czech dissident, writer and statesman Václav Havel said, “but the certainty that something is worth doing no matter how it turns out.” --Vaclav Havel.