Choose with Care

“In the end,” Nick Catricala wrote, “We are our choices.”

Somewhere in the space between the darkness and the light, there may be a precious few seconds where you get to choose between hope or despair, flight or flight, yesterday or today.

It’s a good time to honor the moment.

When this plague passes and we are able to resume our lives, what, I wonder, will we have learned and what, if anything, will we be willing to change. Even if the greedy, selfish and stupid among us are substantially decreased, I’ve lived seven decades and I suspect it will be very little of either. Since the 2016 election, I’ve come to realize that we aren’t built to care or consider others or share even a small amount of kindness. We are out for ourselves. From the highest elected office to the lowliest among us, we have become the very essence of “I’ve Got Mine, Fuck You”. It’s running rampant in government, in religion, in medicine, in business, in education. It’s not confined to any class or political party or skin color or socio-economic level.

We may be, as I recently read, all in the same storm but we’re most definitely not in the same boat. Those that have will survive and if the current government has its way, likely thrive. Those that don’t will be sacrificed. Oh, a few of the idle rich may not be able to buy their way out of the virus and a handful of the poor will recover in spite of not having medical care or equal footing, but in the main, ignorance, arrogance racism, and avarice are going to carry the day. It’s cruel, it’s callous, it’s unfair and it’s unforgivable but it’s what we have become and perhaps most shameful of all, we’re proud of it.

After a decent meal and a good night’s sleep, I am able to regroup and re-evaluate and re-locate that tiny spark that might be optimism. Hope isn’t exactly springing eternal and the light at the end of the tunnel could still be an oncoming freight train or flamethrower but the fog of despair has lifted slightly. I search for and find something positive to hold onto – some small sign of sanity and accountability in a world gone mad. I remind myself that there are more good people than bad in the world and though the bad make for better and more attention grabbing headlines, the good do not give up. And sometimes they win.