220311 covid day 731
Mar. 11
The Cooper's Hawk, who lived on our street with her family in 2020.
April 15, 2020 Poor Rizzo!
Highway 427, Northbound, March 19, 2020, 11:50 a.m. The world changed almost overnight.
Two years, since W.H.O. declared Covid 19 a pandemic on this date, 2020. I suspected it was the real thing on March 4. I did not foresee it lasting this long. I was wearing a mask and gloves in public then, because I was working at my mother-in-law's caregiving residence at the time and extended the practices from there.
It has been a silly fiasco since, with governments all over the world making poor choices, to satisfy the meta-economy, while sacrificing the poor but "essential" workers to continued poverty and illness. The billionaires and corporations went on making millions and billions while many poor people lost their jobs, or worked through covid and hardship to keep the world running. Corporations took covid relief funds and used it to line rich pockets instead of passing on the funds to their bottom-rung workers. The politicians pacified their rich supporters while they mouthed words of false support to their constituents.
I am sick of this corrupt system of government. It has become so clear since covid, how the governments pretended to be all about protecting the people from covid, while only doing enough to look good, and behind closed doors thinking of ways to keep the money flowing into their own and their rich friends' coffers. Politicians should be required to live on the income of their poorest constituents, to ensure that they have their priorities in line with those who elected them. What politician goes without a car, or a home? What politician remembers his standards and the issues that brought him to politics in the first place? By the time they have spent twenty years in the political machinery where they are spending tax money instead of their own, where they please the rich who fund their election, they have long abandoned their original goals. There was enough money in Canada to have closed everything down for two weeks or three, to pay for every family to have food and shelter while they did so. Covid would have stopped then. (I will not, here, look at the world picture: that could have been looked at after the three weeks were up.)
While I am on this subject, there is enough money in Canada to ensure that every, EVERY, Canadian has clean drinking water, a home, and food on the table. DON'T say there isn't! There are forty-five Canadian billionaires, then there are the corporations and financial institutions with banked funds, money that could be used to pay LIVING WAGES, build sustainable infrastructure, climate-friendly energy infrastructure, sustainable food resources, like greenhouses and diversified crops. Manufacturing should not be sent overseas, along with the raw resources. It keeps the peoples of other countries in poverty. Don't tell me that the shipping also provides jobs - it does - but more underpaid, overworked jobs. We have to break the poor/rich barrier. We have to give everyone the best, healthiest life we can, as humans in a world community. We have to ensure that the health of the planet is not thrown away so that a few who have too much already can have more. Please.
Covid: I honestly don't remember, having been very conservative in my pandemic practices, what it's like to live a full, open social life, with coffee visits, meals shared with other households, birthday parties. We have lived away from our home in Etobicoke for fifteen months so that our grandchildren, who live there, could attend school without fear of bringing covid home to us. We have been diligent in getting vaccines, to help protect those around us. Rather than see it as deprivation, I have viewed covid measures as part of a life experience such as my generation has not seen, a world event, exciting in its novelty, the changes it has brought, the innovations.
"Normal", as we knew it before March 11, 2020, is "nevermore". A new normal may emerge as we go forward, but the time has not yet come to say covid is over. Omicron wasn't the last variant to sweep across the planet. There are millions who haven't had a single vaccine, who are still getting sick and dying. Millions around the world are handicapped by "long covid". Wait, wait some more, make a new normal that takes the world on a healthy, sustainable, and loving path. We must hold onto the revelations of inequality which have been laid bare by the pandemic, push through the changes required to lift people out of poverty and neglect, and not let the lessons be lost. Let the new normal be fair, caring, world-community living, for all people everywhere.
Be brave, be strong, be well.
Mumma Yaga
Social distancing works. We can wait.
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