No sooner had I laid my lofty plans to improve myself in this new year than the shutters were pulled down once again on the country. As with virtually every other major decision required to be made by the government it came with no warning. To paraphrase Boris loosely:
We were completely on track as a country until this vexatious virus did the unthinkable (unless you know something about virtually every virus that ever was) and mutated.
And although there may have been some fair amount of evidence that this was happening all the way back in September we have had to close everything down all of a sudden in January because we couldn’t quite bear to cancel Christmas and now this meddlesome mutation did the unthinkable (unless …) and spread like wildfire.
In reality it has had little bearing on my resolutions as such because most of them don’t require outside intervention. Our general malaise though, has given a little wobble to my resolve. I’m not a constant worrier and I don’t get anxious easily. But it does somehow feel closer this time around with several people that I know having caught the virus. Luckily none has needed to go into hospital so far. I need to channel my inner Adriene1 and breathe through the palpable rising perturbation felt by our collective minds.
The scenes at the Capitol building this week were pretty astonishing. Almost as jaw dropping as the 9/11 attacks until I saw the man with the face paint and the horns. Although I still had a fear that these crazy confederate flag waving hoodlums might just turn it into a gunfight at the OK Corral, I felt fairly certain that the Capitol police wouldn’t suddenly do a volte face and join them to create a new republic of Gilead2 Something you can’t fully be sure of in this tangerine nightmare of a term. Given that there were more armed guards on the steps of the building than you could shake shaman’s stick at when the BLM protestors marched, and that this time around they had turned down offers of extra security, you just can’t be sure of anything.
I’m hoping that this is the final act of the Trumpian drama and he is arrested and put into something that matches his skin colour very soon. There has been a wall of silence amongst most Republicans although a few rats are finally trying to leave the sinking ship. Why they are doing this now and not when the government first started locking children in cages at the border with Mexico, I’m not quite sure. Still, there is a little bit of hope here. Everybody, including Betsy DeVos, can see a clear correlation between Trump’s crowd goading by the White House and the vandalism in the building. I mean, if even our glorious blond leader can nearly denounce Donald3, then there is definitely hope that reason may yet prevail.
2 A fictional USA created in ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ by Margaret Atwood
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