Time does not pause

A leaf falls to the sidewalk and withers. Time itself has been altered. March vanished into April, which is disappearing into May, with not even the day of the week always clear. The rituals by which we normally mark these days — the proms and graduations, Easter mass and Opening Day— have been cancelled or postponed, inviting anxieties to fill the void. 

Here in the US, we have a President that fuels this anxiety by bird whistling to reopen the economy via tweet, “Liberate Minnesota, Liberate Michigan…” contradicting his administration’s own stay at home policy and encouraging his base to transmit death through touch and breath. He is encouraging selfish indifference by the attitude that, “life is better if it is better for me, and that everything will be fine if it is fine for me.” 

Look at this leaf and you realize that time does not pause. We have made real progress by sheltering in place the past 6-weeks. But every statistical model shows the contagious virus flourishes around us. Trump, while talking about projected fatality models, joked that the only type of model he’s ever dealt with is the female kind. 

February 26th, at his daily carnivalesque propaganda event, the President said that the country’s 15 cases of infection would soon be zero, given the “pretty good job we’ve done.” At this moment, positive tests in the US total 824,000 with over 45,000 deaths.