It’s of course been a hard and sometimes crazy year, with things we’d never dreamed coming to be—and things we had dreamed getting left behind. So it seems natural now for the end of it to have its own craziness.
I’ve steered clear of straight-up politics in these Pandemic posts, but the strange frenzies reported from the White House are just too mad—as in hatter—to ignore. Sydney Powell, the woman who came up with the idea that the election had been hacked by the long-dead Venezuelan dictator, Hugo Chavez; Michael Flynn, the pardoned former national security advisor now advising martial law in some blue states; and Rudy Guiliani, the once proud and popular mayor of New York City, sweating and dripping hair dye down his cheek on national TV while promoting electoral conspiracy theories…
And the staunch conservatives now abandoning the ship—or being thrown off: Secretary of State Pompeo, disagreeing with the boss on who was behind the recent cyber hack of major companies and government agencies; and Attorney General Barr, the man liberals have loathed, dismissed by the president in the final month of his term.
The West is not immune to the craziness. Ammon Bundy, one of the Malheur occupation leaders a few years ago, surfaced with a band of anti-maskers in the Idaho capitol as the de facto leader of a “health freedom” movement, chanting, breaking glass, demanding freedom from government ordered coronavirus protection measures like masking.
And the streets of Portland, which friends tell me are a shambles after weeks of confrontations among BLM marchers, Proud Boys, and police.
Meanwhile, drumbeats of record contagion and death numbers across the nation, and angel vaccines spinning on production lines on the evening news shows, packed in steaming dry ice, loaded and shipped to somewhere near us. What does 90 degrees below zero centigrade even mean!
“Normal” and “normalcy” the most oft-used words of our days, the white flags signifying that we are done with craziness—and crave peace, that we’ll trade nightmares and extravagant dreams for simple rest
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