No longer as worried about myself or my family getting sick from COVID-19, I briefly considered the feeling my friend aptly described as an armadillo sitting on her chest may be grief; now I understand: it’s anger. Yeah, I’m mad.
I’d been in sitting up in a rented upper in 2003, trying to relax between a night of tending bar and a morning of assistant-teaching preschool when I heard the U.S. had started dropping bombs on Iraq. I’d come up as short of breath I feel now.
When I moved into my apartment in Uptown, Minneapolis, in 2008, I ate catering leftovers from the Republican National Convention (RNC): even though the convention was at about one-eighth capacity, they’d bought out the entire restaurant. So. Much. Waste.
In 2013 in Istanbul I’d had to dance around riot police blocking my street on my way to get copies. When I was done teaching, a tear gas canister went off right in front of me and there I was in black, running with the capulcular, not looking back.
By 2018 I was in my house with my husband and two kids in Douglas, Alaska, tele-editing the German news website and making mostly comfortable mortgage payments. Around Christmas, just before I would begin editing my last articles for the website, which were about something called the Corona virus, I got an email my position would be eliminated.
A friend in the Alaska State Capitol helped me make some contacts and I was able to start working as a House secretary the day after the website job ended. It took four different configurations of childcare but Jacob and I figured out how we could both work full time.
And then, the closures: first our daughter’s preschool, then our son’s daycare, and finally our daughter’s daycare; all of our lovely places. It was the right decision, of course, but at a cost to our kids, who are very social and miss them, and yet… many places haven’t closed, managing to devalue those that have, in accordance with Governor Mike Dunleavy’s cowardly half-measures.
He’s gonna shut it down, I have been saying for over a week about the governor whose recall petition was graciously delivered to me in my car when my son was sleeping, when his decisions were in a way so much more theoretical and not so heavy-hearted. I really have no idea why I expected him to do the right thing.
Last night, The Alaska State Employees Association said office workers who need the jobs the most are the most vulnerable. Public health crisis notwithstanding, we can’t #stayhome if it has not been mandated, and we need the money, end of story.
The U.S. drops bombs; you leave the country and make lifelong friends. You take all the food you can carry from the RNC, give half to your brother. The police burn your tent when you are sleeping in a park to try to protect it. You run away with your friends, laughing.
But this is something completely different than any of these aforementioned scenarios in which I had F*ck the Establishment moments once every five years and then returned to regular life: COVID-19 is regular life, and it hits a bit harder when my daughter asks about her teacher, still not able to understand where she went.
Grocery shopping on my lunch break, red-rimmed, masked folks steer clear of me in shelf-stripped Foodland. I am dazed, seeing for the first time the emptiness, and feeling the widespread panic, when I gravitate toward laughter among the deli workers; I find my voice catches when I thank them for still making sushi.
Back to work.
AngelfromMontgomery et al. 
Wow. Every one of these scenarios necessitates a long discussion, in the same room, with coffee or a beer. Too bad we’ve rarely been able to do that since 1996.