I keep hearing the question, “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” When I think about what was happening four years ago I can’t help feeling as though this is an unnecessary query. Of course I am better today because four years ago we were in a state of uncertainty as we watched people that we knew and loved dying from a strange virus called COVID 19.
I will always vividly remember those first months of 2020 when all the world seemed so normal until suddenly everything changed. I had gone to the Houston Rodeo Cook Off and mingled with large crowds innocently unaware that in only a few weeks the annual Livestock Show and Rodeo would be shut down as a precaution against the virus that seemed to be growing exponentially. I would first hear whispers about it from my sister-in-law who knew people who had returned from travels with a strange sickness. The first public reports of their illness were low key. After all there were only six or seven of them. Then the damn burst.
My husband had been scheduled that to have a heart procedure to unblock two of his arteries. I understood the seriousness of what was happening in the hospital as we were screened for fevers and provided with masks as we entered the building. Once we reached the floor where the treatment would take place I was told that I had to stay there or I would not be allowed to return.
Normally my husband would have spent the night after his arteries had been repaired but on that day he would only stay until he was stabilized and then be sent home. I sat in the waiting room for over twelve hours before a nurse came to escort me out of the building so that I might retrieve my car. It took us more than thirty minutes to find an exit that was not locked up tightly. When I finally picked up my husband in front of the hospital that same nurse earnestly wished us well and urged us to be safe from the virus. The look on her face was serious and frightened.
My husband and I lived in total isolation after that. I ordered groceries from Instacart and other necessaries from Amazon. We had food delivered to our home for special occasions. The schools mostly closed down and then President Trump issued a stay at home order for two weeks to attempt to stem the spread of the virus. Many people began working remotely and I taught my homeschoolers with Zoom. In the midst of all of it there was a political campaign for the presidency that felt so strange.
We celebrated birthdays with Face Time and sent monetary gifts with Venmo. When our anniversary came we ordered food from Brennan’s, dressed up, picked it up and ate on china in our dining room. We braved Thanksgiving outside in our backyard with two grandsons whose parents and brother were at home sick with the virus. We visited our daughter in San Antonio at Christmas time on her driveway in chairs set six feet apart. Christmas came to us by way of the mail and other delivery systems. We got together with the family with Zoom.
It was all so strange and frightening because people were dying and I knew many of them. I kept thinking about the terrified look on the face of that nurse as she bid us goodbye. The doctors in my family were urging us to be very careful so we invested in masks and prayed for the time when we might be vaccinated. We learned how to cope but I worried about the youngsters whose important developmental years were being distorted in ways that I knew would affect them for the rest of their lives.
I was not wrong in that regard. loneliness and despair became as contagious as the virus itself. A very nice man that I knew killed himself. I keep wondering if he would have done so had the world not been so upside down four years ago. The times were so uncertain and somehow we did not work together as a nation. Instead we argued over how to treat the presence of the virus. Our then President Trump fomented divisions among us that led to rifts in friendships and family relationships that should have instead been a time of national unity.
The world is imperfect four years later but most of the worst scenarios are the creations of authoritarians and terrorists who have used this moment to create wars. For people in those situations the suffering continues and entire generations will never be the same as they might have been. Here in the United States we have made it through the worst times. While our economy is still stressful it is actually the best in the world. We will have to have some patience as the needed adjustments continue. Our democracy made it past the attempted overthrow of the election of 2020 by Donald Trump who became the first ever President of the United States to not accept the outcome. We were fortunate to have incredible doctors, dedicated teachers, laborers who worked even as we hid in our homes. We have made a comeback under the patient and steady hand of President Joe Biden. We still have work to do but all in all we are much better off than we were four years ago and none of us should want to go back to those times.
We are only weeks away from another election. We should ask ourselves if cheap gas is more important to us that protecting our democracy from a man who so cravenly abandoned us in one of our darkest hours and then incited a coup when he did not win again. Why would we worry more about inflation than our democracy? If we truly love this country we have to remember what it was really like four years ago. We can’t repeat the nightmare.
All It Takes Is A Little Love 