This week’s column is being posted three days before the U.S. celebration of Thanksgiving. Yes, ‘Muricans, the Internet is not an American-only thing. There are plenty of people around the world who do not celebrate the same holidays as us.
That said, it is safe to say that the 2020 Holiday Season is certainly going to be far different than previous years. Yes, Charlie Brown and the Peanuts gang will have their specials on PBS instead of CBS, and people have started putting up the Christmas stuff far earlier than previously. Some right after Halloween. And the stores are sure as hell starting their “Black Friday” sales a lot earlier and pushing them even harder.
But there’s more to it than that.
This year, there is a push to not gather for the holidays. Stay at home. Don’t get the family together. Mail your gifts and chat via Zoom and Teams and whatever other chatting program we can put to use. Don’t bring the grandparents over for the holidays.
Because 2020 is the year of the COVID-19 global viral pandemic. A pandemic that has killed millions and infected millions more and the numbers are going up and up and up here in the United States.
The majority of the world is having to deal with a second wave on infections; but, here in the United States, it’s all just one wave. Because America has still not yet dealt with the initial infections. We reduced the spread, temporarily. We brought down the numbers, temporarily, but it never went away for us, and those numbers are now back and they’re even higher than in the spring when the initial outbreak hit America. So there is no “second wave” for America to worry about, because it’s all just one viral outbreak.
And so the message is for us to basically cancel the holidays this year. Don’t bring the family together for Thanksgiving. Don’t go mad-shopping on Black Friday. Take it all online. Stay at home for Christmas and New Year’s Eve. Be together in spirit and online.
Even the movie studios are adapting. After being delayed a few times, Warner Brothers has announced they will release the movie “Wonder Woman 1984” not just in the theatres on Christmas Day, but also through their brandy-new streaming service HBO Max. A very smart move if you think about it, because the supposed “big blockbuster” movies that have been released previously have not delivered the box office money they had hopes… because either nobody is going to the theatres because of the pandemic, or because the big theater chains like Regal Cinemas and AMC are shutting down.
The holiday season is all messed up this year.
And it is all our collective fault.
It’s all our fault because we have not taken the necessary precautions to deal with the pandemic.
Yeah, we shut down for a few weeks, but not long enough. And not all of us did. Way too many business declared themselves “essential”. Businesses were more worried about making money than keeping their employees safe. Red-hat governors were busy appeasing an incompetent orange-skinned narcissist who wanted a robust economy instead of worrying about the safety of their citizens.
But do you know who is the most responsible for our continual suffering of the initial COVID outbreak in America? No, it is not the orange-skinned incompetent narcissist who was stupid enough to get COVID himself. It’s not the fault of big businesses that demanded that workers go back to work ASAP.
The true fault for our continued COVID pandemic that is affecting our very being… is ourselves.
Let’s get brutally honest here… we could have had a great holiday season with all of the planned gatherings that we wanted, provided we all heeded the precautions back in the spring and summer. Provided that we all stayed at home unless necessary and wore masks when we couldn’t and socially distanced ourselves when possible. We could be celebrating Thanksgiving and Christmas like we always wanted, had we did what we needed to do earlier in the year.
But we didn’t, did we? Not all of us, anyway.
Instead we have had to deal with red-hat snowflakes that throw screaming temper tantrums when told they have to wear a mask. That pretend to cover their faces instead of actually having a mask with them and wearing it. That plot violent overthrows of state legislatures over mask mandates. That look at the cases being reported and the ever-escalating numbers of those infected and those dying and to this very day are saying “it’s a hoax. It’s no different than the flu. It’ll just go away.”
It’s not. It won’t. Stop lying. And it is your fault that we still have to deal with it today.
Yes, you.
You, my fellow readers, my friends and family and neighbors and co-workers. You the business leaders and politicians and media personalities. All of you. Even the “you” that I see in the mirror every day.
You are all at fault.
Every report in the news today of COVID numbers going up, every report of deaths due to COVID, every story you hear of families having to bury parents and grandparents and children because of COVID, that is all on you!
Not too long ago I read a story from a former OR nurse that had to quit because she could no longer deal with being overwhelmed by the people infected and especially those that were being left to die at the hospital that she worked in. She talked about her encounter with the last patient on her rounds who was in intensive care and was being moved to another room so they could free up the bed space. He had COVID, but he still firmly believed that it was all being blown out of proportion. He assumed it was like the flu and that it would magically go away. The nurse told him, as she was wrapped up in plastic and latex and duct tape that this was her last day there and he was her last patient, that the pandemic is real, and that the whole wing is full of people just like him who had COVID and were either fighting for their lives or were dying. And as she helped roll his bed out so they could have the room for someone else, he saw with his own eyes just how overwhelmed the hospital was, with infected people out in the hallway, some of them just as bad as him. Afterward, he apologized to her, because, until that moment, he really believed the lies and falsehoods being told to him by his friends and family members and those on talk radio and the Internet. It was only then that he realized how serious it was.
Think about it. Hospitals are full of patients, people sick enough to need intensive care, people dying, people being left to die, doctors and nurses overwhelmed, and even those that are sick and dying still believe it’s all overblown, that it’s no different than the flu, that it will just magically go away. Their willful ignorance is responsible for them being in that situation!
Yes, as of this column’s posting, there are possible vaccines being tested that are supposed to be 90-95% effective. But it is still not an instant cure-all. It will still take over a year for it to be implemented to everyone, never mind be effective enough to contain the virus spread.
It will still not magically go away, no matter how many of us want to continue to delude ourselves that it will! Not today. Not tomorrow. Not even into next year!
And, yeah, our orange-skinned super-spreading narcissist had COVID and he got first-class accommodations and experimental treatments, all paid for by the American taxpayers. Accommodations and treatments that the rest of us would never have, ever, unless perhaps we won the lottery. Any of you feel lucky?
So get this into your thick skulls, people: if you bring your family together, with your spoiled kids in school and your entitled relatives and your immune-compromised grandparents, and have everyone together for Thanksgiving like you have done every year in the past, there is a chance that some of you will be sick and/or dead come Christmas. Maybe it’ll be your kids, or your grandparents, or maybe it’ll be you or your spouse. And because of your willful and selfish ignorance, this pandemic will continue to affect us all well into 2021.
We can stop it. We can contain it so that any immunization that gets rolled out can save us so we won’t have to deal with this come next Thanksgiving. But it requires us all to stop being ignorant and start taking the steps now. Is that too much to ask?
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