Damn We Got 2022 Tomorrow

We had to postpone our Christmas because one of our kids had unwittingly exposed themselves to COVID and had to quarantine, but then we had to postpone our postponement because the other kid actually tested positive for it. Someone else in our family realized that the positive test for the one kid meant that they, too, had been exposed, and sure enough a day later symptoms started. Aches, fever, chills, fatigue. They got PCR tested and it came back negative. “I am literally like…wtf.” they announced in the family group chat. Wtf indeed, 2021, wtf indeed.

With everyone vaxxed and boosted in our household actual COVID symptoms are the least of our worries. The management of everyone’s positive or negative status, the management of limited testing availability, who can go to school, who can go to work, who can and cannot be in public, who can and cannot be in the same room as one another, along with every single emotional, relationship, and family dynamic that the management of all these things brings to the fore between us, that is the real crisis. As my kid’s mom said: “It’s not the COVID. It’s the insanity.”

In this sense my family is not unlike this country because for both my family and for the country the problem is no longer COVID, it is the systems. The reason not everyone in our family can afford to get COVID at the same time is that people have to go to work and can’t be in public with COVID. The reason people can’t be in public with COVID is because certain cartoon villain politicians decided to stoke anti-vax sentiment as a way of…