“[W]e estimate that 10,500,000 children lost parents or caregivers … and 7,500,000 children experienced COVID-19–associated orphanhood through May 1, 2022.” The Journal of the American Medical Association
Because we were so unwilling to use masks that would have saved the lives of so many parents or caregivers . . .
Because we were so unwilling to mandate masks in schools or other places of the commons . . .
We made families sacrifice zones once again. We cannot possibly talk about the slave trade or residential schools or the border or the pandemic with any real candor. “How depressing!” we say. “Always a bummer!” we shout.
Masked save and saved lives. We know that. Yet, essential workers was a way of dressing up another sacrifice zone. And that’s not even considering what long Co-Vid has done and is doing to so many.
But . . . the danger of masks. In honor of the late, great Barbara Ehrenreich, we have to get better at hearing bad news. To constantly need positivity and good news is not the gospel (gospel, a bastardization of the word used for Roman military victories). That need for “blue skies” without the blues obliterates the memory of the violence and devastation of colonialism and racial capitalism. The past is romanticized. Every once in a grand while a figure comes along who cavalierly forgets to put the velvet glove on the iron fist. They are crude. They don’t play nice. And the system is unmasked.
If we are not experiencing some form of mental distress or depression on this grid, we might be doing way too well in a system full of violence and death. It shouldn’t feel right.
One of the primary ways that grid, that matrix, thrives is to separate parents from their children, to create trauma hoping for a broken work force that will create hopelessness that turns the cogs and keeps the machine running — the arrogant, violent, and consuming system.
Our task is to remember that hope is not in that system. We require a hope against hope for transformation — for systems and structures that cannot even be seen on the horizon.