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Why I Write When the World is Unraveling
Aren’t there more productive ways to spend my time?
The year 2020 marked a “before” and an “after.” In the early months of Covid, some people said things would never be the same. I rolled my eyes. I thought they were being melodramatic.
What I didn’t realize at the time was that Covid was just the first loose end, the first thread to fray. As it rapidly unraveled our lives, it pulled and tugged at other loosening ends. The calamities collided, tangled, and gathered momentum.
It could be argued that with or without Covid, we would have been headed for the same shitshow. Trump was already President, white extremism was already on the rise, democracy was already at risk, freedoms were already being stripped.
But it was Covid that, at first, offered us an alternate path forward — an opportunity to care for our sick, help our neighbors, unite in the face of natural disasters, overcome our intractable divisions.
There were glimmers of hope here and there, but mostly we ordered food on Grubhub and bought shit on Amazon. Meanwhile, our fellow citizens were gasping on respirators, evacuating their homes, squinting against tear gas. Police officers squeezed and bled the breath from unarmed citizens while armed citizens stormed the Capitol. We were…
