pearwaldorf | (no subject)

Hello from week 2.75 of quarantine. I had a pretty good day yesterday. The sun was shining, I listened/watched a couple livestreams of artists I like, and I felt less isolated than I have in a while. I made split pea soup in the Instant Pot and will never do it on the stovetop again (I think I fucked up the boiling time and they came out weird and undercooked). We ate it with some no-knead bread I made on Sunday and it was deeply satisfying to feed myself and Husbando with things made with my own hands.

So of course it was inevitable that today would be less good. idk if it's actually bad, but I am considerably less cheerful today.

Of all fucking places, this article from the Harvard Business Review about grief was very useful in conceptualizing many of the bad feelings floating around:

You said we’re feeling more than one kind of grief?

Yes, we’re also feeling anticipatory grief. Anticipatory grief is that feeling we get about what the future holds when we’re uncertain. Usually it centers on death. We feel it when someone gets a dire diagnosis or when we have the normal thought that we’ll lose a parent someday. Anticipatory grief is also more broadly imagined futures. There is a storm coming. There’s something bad out there. With a virus, this kind of grief is so confusing for people. Our primitive mind knows something bad is happening, but you can’t see it. This breaks our sense of safety. We’re feeling that loss of safety. I don’t think we’ve collectively lost our sense of general safety like this. Individually or as smaller groups, people have felt this. But all together, this is new. We are grieving on a micro and a macro level.

I found the article helpful and comforting, perhaps you will too.

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“Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.” --Anne Carson

I'm deeply baffled by the rhetoric some people have been espousing re: the necessity of blood sacrifice so the market can keep on trucking along. It is cruel, classist, and ableist, but honestly I'm mostly offended because it's stupid af. Certainly being rich affords many advantages at all times, pandemics included, but people's deaths aren't going to save the economy from collapsing. It's already done. And there are responsible ways, and real fucking shitty ways to contain the fallout from that.

Look. Nobody's going to say the Tories are doing a good job at anything. But even they understand you can't just let people twist in the wind at a time like this. Are there problems with the scheme they're proposing? I'm sure. But even what they have proposed is more than anything the US federal government has done so far. cf Denmark, the Netherlands. This NYT article has a good overview of what said countries are giving in terms of income assistance.

In the article, a waitress from the Netherlands says "Everybody here believes that the government will take responsibility for the situation, and I believe that too.” I legit cried on reading that because I no longer remember what it feels like to have faith/confidence my government will take care of people. Not even me, but people in general.

So yeah, I have a lot of rage and grief at the situation this administration has put us in. People have died and will continue to die because this administration is full of incompetents (at best) and ghouls who don't give a shit about anything other than themselves. And short of mobs and guillotines, it's quite likely they will escape consequence. That's where I'm at today.

And now, I am going to make some hot cocoa because I want some.