What is Love #3

On Credit Scores and COVID

It’s COVID season again. Isn’t COVID seasonal now? Every Spring and Summer don’t we declare it’s over, and we run around unmasked, spitting all over each other? And then in the fall and winter, isn’t it suddenly like “oh shit I have COVID, she has COVID, he just tested positive for COVID.” and then you’re taking off work, standing in line for two hours with your kid to get a PCR or spending $100 on rapid tests from CVS but hoarding them because you’ll have to use them to get off quarantine?

This is not a post about COVID this is a post about love and by love I mean care and by care I mean whatever it is that we don’t do with each other enough to keep each other alive and happy and healthy and safe. We were born on a planet that grows food and now we have credit scores. How did we fuck this up so bad. This is a meme I saw at five different places yesterday, because adrienne marie brown posted it and like half the people I talk to regularly shared it. It resonates for everyone.

There is a feeling of profound betrayal, profound alienation. How, indeed, did we fuck this up so badly. How did we end up spending months looking for health insurance? How did my kids mom and I spend hours with our kid yesterday trying to figure out how to organize our tax status and filing histories in such a way as she can qualify for financial aid, when we know good and well that we can’t afford to send her to college any other way? Why does she have to go to pay six figures to get a degree?

I’m not just complaining. I’m wondering how we managed to land on a loving earth and to create so little love for one another. And by so little love I mean so little care. Part of being alive is knowing that there is enough care in the world for you, and yet there is not enough care in the world for you.

I joined a trans secret santa group this year. I’m buying clothes for some 17-year-old in foster care who doesn’t have the money to dress as ambiguously as they like. I find it odd how “acts of charity” are reserved for people who are “less fortunate” as though the only time you should be kind is when someone has been thoroughly and violently fucked. Hey, what if the real act of kindness is to create a society where no one gets that fucked to begin with? Maybe lets move our kindness a little more upstream. Maybe our kindness can come in the form of caring for and respecting trans people, having universal healthcare, reparations, universal basic income, a social safety net. But we can’t. We have to fight literally tooth and nail, blood and guts for the right to even be a human, much less to care for another human.

How did we fuck this up so badly?