Happy Thanksgiving

 

It is both troublesome and heartening. That 2020 Americans—perhaps the most contentious and divided US population ever—feel a powerful need to congregate and gather in one another's company this Thanksgiving.

Even at the risk of making our loved ones—and each other—sick.

Wow.

In one sense, it speaks to our humanity, something I thought we'd surrendered long ago. We are, after all, social creatures, given to seek company and connection. And judging by the network news reports, we are seeking that en masse.

In another, it speaks to our proclivity for panic. And our inability—or unwillingness—to process events too cataclysmic to conceive. A stealthy, invisible virus hopping from one body to another in ways we don't fully comprehend is simply too horrifying for us to imagine.

So we don't.

We seize on an imagined normal and cherry-pick evidence that supports this ideal. Or conjure up our teenaged selves, indomitable and resistant: “It won't happen to me!”

And it may not. COVID-19 reminds me of a tornado, a storm which rarely follows a predictable, linear path. It skips about, pulverizing one structure while leaving an adjacent one practically untouched.

It is a mystery, still.

Yet we appear to be on the cusp of a vaccine. But given the enormity of the world's population and the problematic issues of distribution and—in one case, storage—relief could be many, many months away. (I refuse to even consider those who will reject the vaccine based on some flimsy notion of religion or personal liberty.)

So I continue to lay low, as uncomfortable and unnatural as it is.

Whatever your take on the pandemic, I wish you and your loved ones well this Thanksgiving. I've no desire whatsoever to be proven “right” if a mounting pile of corpses is to be my proof.