The Rites (and Oh-So-Wrongs) of Spring
Spring is meant to stir hope within our breasts but two years into the global pandemic, I’m still rifling through Pandora’s box for it and coming up empty. According to the Greeks, it’s supposed to be in here, right? Pretty sure I read she shut the lid just in time to capture it. This isn’t some trixter tickle-trunk of junk instead? By some miracle, my keys hang as heaven intended upon the key-ring this morning. My glasses lie safely inside their case. Where-the-eff, I whisper, is hope? Check under the bed, I bellow upstairs to my only child, the sweetest, most patient kid ever to survive two years (thus far, I sob) of viral planetary havoc. This week marked the Vernal Equinox, but it’s feeling equal parts noxious instead. Correct me if I’m wrong, but springtime ought to signal new life emerging, not a sudden spike in deaths.
The Ontario so-called ‘government’ — whose epic “fumble, flail and fail” strategy my neighbours and I boldly attempt to survive — has decided that it can’t even any longer with COVID-19. Ontario premier Doug Ford and his cronies instead adopt an approach Trump took back in February 2020 when the former POTUS assured those whom he considers the unwashed masses that it’s perfectly fine to remain unwashed because this virus is, “going to disappear. One day — it’s like a miracle — it will disappear. And from our shores, we — you know, it could get worse before it gets better. It could maybe go away. We’ll see what happens. Nobody really knows.”
Well, place me squarely in the faction of society that believes certain people, in fact, do know and they happen to be real, live scientists, including actual epidemiologists like Dr. David Fisman. In August of 2021, Fisman resigned from the Ontario Covid-19 Science Advisory Table over lack of transparency in provincial pandemic projections, insisting that what Ontario needs instead is “a public health system that is arm’s length from politics.” I, for one, agree with him. Masks will remain firmly affixed to my face and my kid’s for the forseeable future. We choose to care about the vulnerable and immunocompromised versus those who stare vacuously into a pool, rapt in obsessive admiration of their own maskless reflections like so many who roam our streets of late. The same conspiracy-licking hordes who cower in convoy cabs pretending bravery while simultaneously kidding themselves that COVID is no more (and for the majority of them, never ever, ever was.)
This week, I read that Hong Kong surpassed 1 million cases of COVID-19 while photographs of body bags in its hospitals surface on Twitter. Someone tweets there’s only about 300 hospital beds left as that city buckles under the weight of yet another wave. Wasn’t it a mere four days ago, Carrie Lam, Hong Kong’s Executive Director, announced a plan to relax flight bans and quarantine protocols from which she and her city now reel in furious backpedal, spewing apologies like airborne atoms? China itself currently battles its worst outbreak since the onset of the pandemic. The World Health Organization (WHO) just announced that BA.2, the aptly named “stealth” subvariant of Omicron, is responsible for 75% of the current global cases, nearing 23% of cases in the United States as of last week. What does BA stand for? I’m no scientist myself, but Bite-you-in-the-Ass point 2 is admittedly the first interpretation that leaps to mind.
My kid exited the car masked today like the superhero they are despite the fact school boards all across the province begin to relax their mandates and end tracking and tracing. Talk about putting the broken in March Break. Pinkie-swear, I’m not generally a paranoid individual. Still I felt compelled to rub my eyes and re-read the school signage just to confirm it didn’t spell Abandon hope all ye who enter here before pulling away from the curb and blowing a masked kiss towards my tween. Cosmos willing that’s the only airborne thing they catch today as our government ‘leaders’ at every level continue to fashion nine concentric rings of health-crushing hell and beckon us all thither.
Pandora, where are you when we need you? Close the damn lid already! Secure hope somehow for us all so it doesn’t melt completely away with the winter snows for the second consecutive spring under pandemic. My own attempts to rage against the dying of the light municipally, provincially and federally have fallen on ears no longer burdened by loops. In Ontario, an election looms yet ours is not the sole soulless government out there prioritizing economy over lives. It’s like listening to the ultimate con artist Tom Waits embodies in his song, Step Right Up. This ain’t no lullaby. It’s practically the Premier’s personal anthem and Ford’s hoping it will, like the song says, win him a (re-)election.
It’s why he now openly woos the minds and hearts (all evidence to the contrary, I sob) or, okay, the votes of the convoy crowd. Last month, Ford — with the neurological vacancy of a valley girl straight out of 90210 — pronounced the pandemic to be, like, so totally over as though he might miraculously effect its end through sheer political will. He needs to win again come June. For the sake of Ontario, our kids, their parents, grandparents, siblings, educators and healthcare providers, we need to make sure he doesn’t.
Meantime, brace yourselves. Reason continues to be forsaken. Science, suppressed. Spring 2022 has sprung and what rough beast, I ask myself, slouches alongside?
Godspeed to us all.
