Living through a pandemic -- if you were one of the lucky ones. What will we take away from this?
Let's not a positive: Governor Andrew Cuomo attempted to work across party lines when necessary. He also called out the president when necessary but did so as an adult. (Apparently suffering from senility, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi grew ever more childish throughout the pandemic.) Cuomo was a leader on the national stage at a time when Joe Biden was still attempting to figure out how to live stream online. When noting mistakes, Cuomo noted his own and not just those of other people. His politics are to the right of our own but we are more than thrilled to praise him for offering leadership at a time when a lot of people could not or would not.
Other than that? We congratulate the American people who made it through and did so with little to no assistance from so-called public servants. In our community, many of us made the point that we were not all in this together; however, no one made it more often than Trina. She was correct that it was an empty slogan. And she was correct that it was an empty slogan intended to lull us into complacency.
And that's about it on the positive side.
Congress made it very clear that we were not in this together. Over and over, they voted for corporations and not for We The People. This was especially disappointing with regards to the House of Representatives which the Democrats control. When not showing off her ritzy ice cream ("let them eat ice cream"), Pelosi had nothing to offer.
We were reminded repeatedly of just how useless Congress was by not just their refusal to help the American people but also by the fact that they were 'non-essential.' Did you miss that? While the people working in clinics and hospitals -- office staff, nurses, techs, doctors, custodial staff -- were expected to go to work every day and while the person working the drive thru at McDonalds and the person stocking the shelves at Wal-Mart were expected to go to work, Nancy Pelosi refused to call the House back into session. If you ever doubted just how non-essential Congress actually is, make a point to thank Speaker Pelosi for making it clear.
Whiners are the next group that got on everyone's nerves. They were almost as bad as Congress -- certainly as useless. If you missed them, they showed up to whine that they saw someone in a Wal-Mart buying a kid's game or some things for crafting or -- Whatever. A parent of a young child is going to pick up something to amuse a kid that is no longer leaving the house to go to school. Pull the stick out of your rear and stop worrying about things that clearly don't have anything to do with you. It's a super center, a Wal-Mart super center. We don't need to go back to the days of blue laws and aisles taped off in the stores on Sundays. You going to have a fit too if you see someone go to the toy aisle in a dollar store?
After Congress and whiners, the most irritating were celebrities. Not all celebrities were a pain, mind you. But those like Alyssa Milano, Ellen DeGeneres and others who whined about being bored, or it being like being in prison? And don't forget the ridiculous David Geffen Tweeting from his yacht about how he was avoiding the pandemic. We can forgive a bad cover of "Imagine" but we can't forgive people who lack any sense of perspective. (In contrast, Rita Wilson and Tom Hanks were inspiring as they dealt with coronavirus. They were a calming and positive force.)
You know what else was irritating?
The way we all quickly appeared to move on as a nation. A pandemic? You would have thought it would have registered more. We seemed ("we" includes all of us -- if it doesn't apply to you, let it slide down your back) to go from concern and panic to boredom -- as though it was a new video game we quickly tired of.
Is it over? No. New cases continue to turn up. Also there's no vaccine. It's probably going to return stronger this winter.