101. Sores

This pandemic continues to expose long-standing sores on the body politic. It’s like a solvent that washes away the scab we call racism and exposes the sores born by Blacks, Asians, Indians—anyone away from the shrinking white male majority. 

 

The news yesterday said it was the day that working women will have earned as much—adding in their 2020 wages—as their male colleagues earned in all of 2020. The pandemic has taught us to look for such things, taught us that women are bearing more than their share of the child-rearing load—and getting laid off more frequently than their husbands and male colleagues.

 

The pandemic has scoured the gun violence scab in Atlanta and now Boulder. It exposes a ragged wound in many places across the country—in Connecticut, Nevada, and Virginia, Florida, Texas, and California, which have all grappled with mass killings in recent years. And there are personal scars in small places everywhere where guns have killed partners and storekeepers, been picked up and aimed in play by one child on another, or turned on their owners and handlers in suicide. Today’s news: although no major mass gun murders in the Covid year until Atlanta and Boulder, “daily gun crime” soared, with 4000 more 2020 murders than in 2019.

 

There has never been more talk—and awareness—of the notions of privilege and racism in our country than we’ve heard since the first days of the pandemic. We now know that people of color serve basic health needs as caregivers and nursing home workers in outsized numbers; that people of color are less likely to have jobs they can do remotely; that people of color are more likely to live in crowded and less healthy surroundings; we know that Indian reservations are often places of poverty and lack basic healthcare facilities and personnel. Somewhere deep inside we’ve learned that the “original sin” of slavery echoed historically and echoes today in exclusion laws targeting Asians, in Jim Crow and Indian Removal, in the subtle racism that we now name “unconscious” or “implicit” bias.  

 

With George Floyd and Brionna Taylor and Black Lives Matter becoming household words, and the turmoil of the Trump years and an election season mixed into the Pandemic stew, the sores—and shortcomings—in the body politic are given bright light. 

 

We grasp at old healing ideas and search for new: gun laws; Indian sovereignty; reparations; equal pay; universal health care access; criminal justice reform; communitarianism… The healing tasks are enormous. Hard not to get overwhelmed.

 

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