The following column is the opinion and analysis of the writer:
Shuffling along in the line at the county’s south-side temporary testing site, I tried not to eavesdrop on the exhausted woman pleading for a COVID test. “I have asthma.” She begged the clerk. “My husband’s in the car. He’s awful sick.”
“I’m sorry. You need to make an appointment online.” I clutched my appointment printout tighter than my vaccination card.
Following the arrows hastily taped to the worn carpet, we passed by a sign of the times. “We have the right to refuse service to anyone we feel is becoming hostile to our staff. We are working as hard as we can to follow protocol.”
We’re all doing the best we can in spite of those immune to reason.
When I was informed my test result was negative for COVID, my wife said, “I could have told them you were a negative person.”
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I feared a child asking me in the distant future, “What did you do during the great pandemic? “
“I had a mild sore throat. Probably a cold.“
Two of my children and a grandchild survived COVID. Close friends died from COVID. As vulnerable friends struggled with family members who refused to get vaccinated against COVID, I became infected with corrosive rage, fury for the fools contaminated with cognitive dissonance, the bellowing biohazards among us who upended any collective will to contain the lethal plague that repeatedly hit close to our hearth.
In cautious isolation, waiting for my bad cold to pass, I caved to my anger by watching a “therapeutic” clip from the movie “Nobody” over and over. In the seven-minute sequence, Bob Odenkirk savagely beats five thugs he sees bullying a young girl on a bus, five stand-ins for those who threatened my family’s health.
After 15 days cloistered with a raw throat, a wandering pulse, weird headaches and fatigue, I found a second test at a pop-up in a mega-church parking lot. Waiting in my car, I opened a text from the beloved daughter who had texted me months earlier from her harrowing COVID quarantine, “I’m not ready to die, I’m not ready to die.” This day’s read “ICUs all full here w/the unvaxxed. Stay safe, pops. XXOO.”
The result? I had COVID. The Christmas ornament my daughter crocheted and gave us, the spiked coronavirus ball that made us laugh Christmas morning, was hung on our door as a sober warning to visitors one of us was ill.
During home quarantine I wondered about the self-imposed isolation that politicians enthusiastically embraced, where they remained cloistered far from the suffering they invited into our communities. They must have had friends like I did. Old and young friends? With every death I mourned for them knowing they must have experienced raw merciless terror as their lungs failed them and the quicksand of death swallowed them as they searched for familiar faces that were not there.
When my fevers came I recalled an earlier visit to a Walmart where I couldn’t help but glare at the unfit citizens who gleefully defied the store’s mask policy. I watched in horror as the accomplices of a lethal killer breezed past anxious masked seniors and despairing exhausted parents who steered their strollers in the opposite direction.
Felled by fatigue, I lay down and watched a video of my grandkid singing at her public school’s choir concert last Autumn in Phoenix. There she was, the one kid brave enough to wear her mask, packed in a choir of maskless classmates belting out show tunes and contagion in a packed auditorium of maskless parents. In the middle of a pandemic that was killing thousands daily the school had been hammered by freedom-barking mobs, the same thoughtful suburbanites who offered ivermectin to my granddaughter’s family when COVID swept into their home.
Within days I was tapping out texts to my grand immunocompromised fifth grader as her mom rushed her to the ER because she had difficulty breathing and was terrified.
I cursed the school’s cowed “leadership” yet I understood why they buckled. For the same reason stores and arenas throw up their hands. Not one politician in state leadership had anyone’s back. But they had the mischievous will to antagonize rational municipal leaders across the state who took the public health crisis seriously, like Mayor Romero.
As I recover, my faith in our institutions and our fellow citizens will never recover. Health care, school and social welfare systems are overrun, overwhelmed and abandoned. Our indifferent public-health-undermining, conspiracy-peddling politicians in Phoenix answer by plotting electoral thievery.
Back at my board I sketched the most tragic long-hauler I know, our democracy. I discarded it, relished the gift of a deep breath, looked out my window at the beautiful day and hesitated to venture out.
