What Do You Do When the World Rolled Up the Sidewalks and Hung Out a Closed Sign?

Yesterday I read about a real-life angel

I have an old fashioned sugar jar — the kind you’d reach for in a 1950’s diner when some waitress named Flo sashayed over in a pale-pink diner uniform and set your coffee on the table in one of those thick white restaurant mugs.

You’d tip the sugar jar above your spoon as she flashed you a Colgate smile and asked if you want anythin’ else, honey.

Sometimes, the sugar won’t pour.

Humidity and time, that’s what causes that — and if you’re smart you’ll turn the jar right side up before you give it a whack to get the sugar flowing again.

I feel like the sands of time have done that, gotten stuck in the hourglass, and try as I might, I can’t turn the hourglass upside down to whack it, because reverse aging is reserved for the likes of Brad Pitt in Benjamin Button, not ordinary folk like you and me.

Every day is groundhog day now, isn’t it?

Too much isolation, and not enough laughter, I suppose.

I come to Medium and the homepage is filled with stories from last month or last year and I wonder if it’s because I’ve muted so many of “those” stories that the algorithm now works like an old-timey GPS from a decade or two ago.

Recalculating, recalculating.

Like it doesn’t know what to show me.

Fair point. I don’t know what I want to read anymore, either. For darn sure, not those people humble-bragging about how much they earned while other people are struggling to pay the bills, and I dunno. I want to slap them.

How tone-deaf can you be, exactly?

Yesterday I read about a real-life angel…

Supported her husband through open heart surgery and recovery while she was raising her teen-aged daughter and working full time and taking care of her 86 year old ailing Mother all at the same time.

She was a nurse. In New York.

Died all alone while her daughter collapsed on the floor of their kitchen, holding her phone and yelling Mommy, don’t leave me.

Her daughter had texted her, begging her to stay strong. Please get better. I love you Mom.

Love you, she replied.

And then she died, all alone, and they hauled her body away because they needed the bed.

At some point, you can’t read that stuff anymore. You know?

The happy stories, sure, but feeds aren’t ice cream trucks and they don’t let you pick the flavor and after a while the stories of bodies piled up and meat trucks in the parking lots and doctors writing farewell letters to their families while the brain-deads party in the park down the street from the hospital…

You can’t.

Just can’t.

Anymore.

It’s not just that I want things back to normal.

I mean, I do. We all do.

I want to go shopping for bedding plants and bananas and smile at random strangers in the grocery store without a mask on my face. I want to see little old ladies with a twinkle in their eye instead of the abject fear I see there.

You know what I want more than I want to go back to normal?

I want to know where we’re going from here.

Dorothy was right. There’s no place like home, but we can’t go back there because the wizard of odds stole the ruby red slippers and the yellow brick road leads to a mansion in a gated community and we’re rattling the gates, pleading for help while the winged monkeys close in on us.

Or bats. As it were. It wasn’t a monkey. It was a bat.

Remember Flo in the diner?

Back then, the average CEO earned in one day what she earned all month. And today? It would take a McDonald’s worker over 3000 years to earn what the CEO earns in one year.

Put simpler, one man gets paid the same as 3000 people who don’t have sick pay, but need the job because it’s all that stands between them and homeless.

That’s what you want to restore, Mr. Politician?

Best get us back to work so your stock portfolio doesn’t slip, right?

It is looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck…

It’s not about us. It was never about us. If it was, minimum wage wouldn’t be $7.25, would it? No. It’s about the profit machine. Keep the plebes working so they can pay their bills like good little cogs in the profit machine and Us? We’re just happy if we don’t end up homeless.

There’s no normal on the other side of this.

Some of the small businesses closing their doors won’t ever open them again.

Children will grow up without parents or grandparents they shouldn’t have lost. Trauma and PTSD among healthcare workers is going to make military cases look like scattered peanuts on the floor of the pub.

I’m talking volume. The walking wounded. Forever and ever, amen.

Hard working people will lose their homes while the Grand Poobah bails out the airlines and mega corporations and the one percenters smile for the paparazzi as they talk about tax deductions disguised as donations.

What do you do if you had 2 months of savings when the world rolled up the sidewalk and hung out a closed sign?

Worry. I guess.

It’s like we collectively bolted awake from a nightmare, but the nightmare didn’t end when our eyes opened and so we’re living the nightmare with our eyes wide open. Too many of us.

Others haven’t opened their eyes yet. Some people never will. That’s fine. Gravity doesn’t care if you believe in it.

It didn’t have to be this way.

If we don’t learn something from all of this? If we don’t change something, then we — as a culture — are doing something truly, horribly wrong.

All that’s required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.

So I just want to know.

Where are we going from here?

Judge a man by his questions, rather than by his answers. — Voltaire