I find myself rushing

I find myself rushing. Not sure where. I eat fast, I hurry across the house to do some task. I gobble up posts on Facebook and Instagram, scrolling impatiently. Why? There is nowhere to go. There is no list of things I must do. It's nervous energy - like everyone, I'm not used to such prolonged uncertainty. I'm not used to feeling out of control - not only in the political sphere and the social sphere but also in the biological sphere. I'm used to fires, evacuations. I'm used to some kinds of flooding, to storms, to torrential rain and snow. But I've never felt like a door handle could be lethal.

We are all living with ambiguous loss; a sense that there is no new normal, or fear of what it might be. Plus, we have no idea how - or when - it will emerge. We see armed men storming the capitol buildings in certain states, demanding that the governors open up the economy and stop the shelter-in-place orders. Trump cheers them on. We see horror stories of the scale of death in places where they never did close the economy. South Dakota comes to mind - in dozens of enormous meat packing plants there are scores of workers infected with Covid-19, yet the governor refuses to make a stay-at-home order. In other places it is the retirement homes and veterans rehabilitation centers where the percentage of people infected and dying makes one think of concentration camps. We know that in prisons and detention centers, where people are forced to live packed together, the death rate is skyrocketing. We hear about the way this disease may cause millions to die south of our border: in Mexico, Central and South America. Brazil is already having a massive outbreak because, like America's Trump and England's Boris Johnson, their president didn't listen to medical predictions. He didn't want to shut businesses down. Consequently, the death toll is way higher than if he had. We hear there are resurgences of high death rates when the economies of Asia open up, suggesting we don't yet know even rudimentary things about how this virus acts, replicates, and re-surfaces. We have no idea what the time frame is - J and I talk about being in our house for a year or maybe even two; basically until there is a vaccine - IF they can make one.

Yet there is no time to grieve. If not for a person, for a world. For the world as we knew it before this. Which was only 60 days ago, or less. In this new world we have a constant sense of foreboding, a sense of invasion from somewhere strange. We feel like we're in a horror movie, and the music is caught in a loop and we can't change the channel We feel threat. We feel dread. Threat from men in plaid shirts waving automatic rifles at nurses. Think about that for a second: those who want to shoot people dead trying to intimidate those who are risking their lives, and those of their loved ones, to keep strangers alive. At least that we can see - it is unnerving to the max to feel dread from something invisible.

These feelings are followed by anger at the stupidity and venal selfishness of our President, our leader, and our resignation that we can't influence him and those that he intimidates into being his sycophants. Even if  we feel smug at how right we were, that he is incapable of leading or caring, our smugness is unsatisfying - a thin windbreaker in a furious hurricane. We still can't believe there are millions of people who don't see him for the ridiculous charlatan he has always been, a giant baby careening around the world smashing things and crying out with glee. We know that forty years from now people will look back in wonder and horror at how we elected a scurrilous, narcissistic, pathological liar whose credentials were that he was a cruel television host and a failed real estate tycoon. What could possibly go wrong with that?

Well now we know.

So we eat. Or bake and then eat. Or we rush. Or we watch too much TV and feel bloated. Or eat too many potato chips and want to purge. Nothing feels in balance because nothing is, and our sense is compounded by the feeling that no one has any idea how far the scale might tip before it rights itself. Are we talking months? Years? A generation? Ever? Is it true, as other prophets are saying about climate change, that we could tip the scale so far it will come crashing down on us, on our species?

I remember people talking this way about nuclear warfare. We built our defenses so we could blow the world up many times over, as if any time more than once was greater protection. I remember we felt vindicated for winning the arms race when the Soviet Union fell. And then we began war after war, mostly in the Middle East, to secure the greedy needs of oil profiteers and their refusal to change patterns of transportation. "It fuels the economy," was the justification, though the inequalities of who fought and who profited were always glaring. Our enormous military budget needed a war periodically to justify its existence; creating bogus wars got us into the ones we are still trapped in.

We didn't plan for other kinds of war, and what we did was torn apart by our current administration. Today our Pentagon gets $617 billion and the National Institute of Health gets $41 billion. The two wars that have brought us to our knees - the cyber attacks that got us this President and the virus we are fighting now - can't be fought with all the tanks, missiles, nuclear submarines,and Kevlar wearing ground troops we spent decades creating. It would be funny - ironic, a great joke of nature - if it weren't so tragic to watch the death toll mount and have no idea when it will peak.