Unfathomable
You know the story. We all saw Dr. Fauci take center stage for a time, speaking truth and science. Maybe, like me, you had hoped the President could set aside his maniacal self-interest.
The piece below was written during the COVID pandemic. I’m including it on my Substack as a remembrance of the pandemic before the rollout of the mRNA vaccine.
In late January of 2020, I made the long drive from Marin County to Tucson with a black lab and whatever I could shoehorn into a Toyota RAV4. For company, I listened to the impeachment trial of Donald J. Trump—knowing it was highly unlikely the Republican-dominated U.S. Senate would remove their boy from office.
Still, I listened intently, hoping our democracy would prevail.
Trump stayed put. Adam Schiff, Marie Yovanovitch, and Alexander Vindman fell out of the news cycle.
The week after I moved into a 500-square-foot bungalow near the University of Arizona, the grief over the Senate’s failure to man up was still with me.
Life went on. I visited the U of A modern art museum and walked around campus. Students and faculty were everywhere. The pandemic still felt a world away.
In early March, my daughter visited me for a couple of days. We ate in restaurants and got tattoos—not her first, but mine. She had drawn a bird on a branch, and the tattoo artist inked her design onto my low back, just above my hip.
She slept a lot—the way I used to when I visited my mom. When we said our goodbyes, we promised not to let more than two months pass before seeing each other again.
Then the world shut down. You know the story. You saw Dr. Fauci take center stage for a time, speaking truth and science. Maybe, like me, you had hoped the President could set aside maniacal self-interest.
But Trump at the podium was a defiant, broken adolescent, seemingly bent on destroying the nation in service of his fractured ego.
One could only hope that sanity would step in come November—wearing a mask that said, “Vote Biden.”
I wore a mask in the grocery store and saw the same fear and grief in the eyes of other shoppers. Evenings, to combat the grief, I ran up my street and onto the University campus. It was empty—classrooms locked, parking lots deserted. Six flights up a parking garage, the sun slipped behind the Rincon Mountains and washed orange and pink over the houses. The beauty restored my faith in life. One morning, unpinning laundry from the clothesline, I buried my nose in a dry cotton sheet. It was an uncomplicated smell—fresh and full of hope.
Still, I felt a profound, amorphous grief watching a CNN report from Memorial Day weekend—beaches, swimming pools, bars, and restaurants packed with maskless people. That same week, the President mocked Joe Biden for wearing a mask. Anderson Cooper called Trump a “little man,” pointing to his complete lack of empathy and leadership.
The President and those who continued to put their faith in him were tearing apart a nation already hanging by threads. We had become the masked vs. the unmasked.
“We’re in deep trouble,” Cooper said.
Yesterday, Robert F. Kennedy, Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, announced that the agency had canceled $500 million in mRNA vaccine funding. Imagine if the COVID-19 vaccine had never been brought to market. The additional loss of lives and livelihoods would have been unfathomable.
More than five years later, I’m also struck by the cruel irony of ICE agents—under the second Trump administration—wearing masks to conceal their identities.
Unfathomable. And yet.