Woke Supremacy
And so, we marked the one-year anniversary of the official declaration of the global pandemic.
Several weeks before, we observed another anniversary, that of the first recorded case of Covid-19 in the United States. On January 21st of 2020, a man in Washington who’d recently returned from Wuhan brought back a bug that would soon wash over the entire American nation and change all of our lives forever. Over 527,000 Americans had died from the novel coronavirus by that auspicious anniversary of March 11th. Nearly half of those deaths occurred over the Thanksgiving and Christmas holiday season of 2020.
There was an estimate of U.S. 2020 coronavirus deaths by month, according to NBC News data compiled in early 2021:
February: 1
March: 3.768
April: 58,960
May: 42,099
June: 23,416
July: 26,164
August: 30,234
September: 23,341
October: 23,691
November: 37, 172
December: 77, 124
January 2021: 96,377
February 2021: 72,880
Look at those spikes in December and January.
All for a couple of holidays, one rooted in Indigenous genocide, the other a Christian bastardization of the winter solstice, each born within colonial or religious constructs of white imperialism.
Say it with me, friends.
Sentiment is a heavy monkey.
Barring any new in-roads taken by mutated variants from South Africa, the U.K., Brazil, and inevitably elsewhere, a potential end game of the pandemic was in distant sight. Covid hospitalizations dropped 40% in late February and early March. Infections dropped 35% across the country, likely because folks were minding their P’s and Q’s so close to the finish line. They were thinking it would’ve been a shame to finally catch Covid when their pending vaccine appointment was literally right around the corner. It was a less than stellar vaccine rollout, and it reflected typical class showings in access to resources. According to Cal Matters public health data, of the 7.3 million doses administered in California at that time, 2.9% went to Blacks, 13% to Asians, 16% to Latinos, and 32.7% to whites. Surprise.
All the same, it felt, to a degree, like we might’ve been starting to get a handle on things. It was entirely possible that was a fleeting hope, however, what with Covid mutations and variants beginning to proliferate and the inevitable reality those who were vaccinated were going to start going out more frequently than they should have before the majority of Americans got their vaccines. It was imperative for folks to remember while they were safer from Covid related deaths after getting their second dose of vaccine, others may not have received their vaccine yet. Vaccinated people were still carriers to the unvaccinated. Until three quarters of us had achieved confirmed immunity, going by the epidemiological science protocols, we still needed to practice the same vigilance even if we were personally safe, which meant it was not quite time to go to Disneyland just yet.
At that point, a majority of experts agreed the best way to achieve herd immunity in the most expedient way possible was to vaccinate as many Americans as we could and damn the tiers, especially when considering much of the public was still expressing a fair amount of vaccine alarmism and concerns about efficacy and side effects. The proven science still won out over fear of the unknown. A full dose of the vaccine properly administered and coupled with the standard post-vaxx three-week incubation period, took the possibility of death from Covid almost entirely off the table, more or less eliminated the possibility of hospitalization, and drastically reduced carrier potential to spread infection.
It appeared I’d be getting my first jab by the end of March, perhaps the first week in April. If Biden’s administration managed to coordinate approvals and services to ramp up production and enough of us Americans got in line, putting the bulk of Covid heat behind us might’ve been a doable thing by midsummer (that didn’t happen, alas). Whether we were infected or not, we’ve all been afflicted with a new kind of mass, post-traumatic stress, a communal psychic wound that will last the rest of our generation’s time on this planet. It was strange to think Generation X ended up dwelling within an era defined by such a pestilence, same as the bubonic plague in the 1300’s, or smallpox in the early 20th century.
We were fortunate that science was at a level where it could quickly adapt to a changing viral condition. Historians and scientists alike claimed we’d look back on this time as either a wake up call, or the onset of the end for our species. Of course, humans had been saying that for decades, noting how rapidly we’d approached global decline in a mere hundred years of industrial expansion, encroaching rain forests and wildlife habitats (and releasing unknown viruses), terraforming most of the Earth’s continental living space, polluting virtually all aspects of our needed ecology, the air, the land, the water. Laying waste to the planet to utilize natural resources seemed counterintuitive, but there we were and here we are, subject to these monkey brains that prefer addressing the now instead of the later.
At that time…heck, I still wonder…I often considered the likelihood of other planetary civilizations already having fallen, succumbing to hubris and self-gratifications and imbalances with their ecospheres. What must it be like, being a species who managed to circumvent their intellectual and technological adolescences? I’d love to know. I don’t think I’m going to find out while still trapped within my current vessel. The answers are probably going to have to wait until my current perspective expands itself. It’d be nice to come upon that psychic evolution before my death, but as with most humans, I’m probably going to end up taking that long feared road first, before stepping into a new dawn.
Man. Sometimes it sucks, being a corporeal mammal of simian descent. Am I right? Why aren’t we yet beings of angelic light, flying through the universe willy-nilly, connected to everything and everyone, full of love, shining and bright and at peace? Oh, that’s right. We kinda are. We’re just…at the beginning of our ascent. From the mud, we rise. From the ashes, the phoenix is born. Blah blah blah.
Not that meta-spiritual context outside of Christianity mattered to many in regards to Covid, particularly QAnon folk endorsing antisemitic tripe like wealthy Jewish bankers starting Californian megafires by firing lasers from space. A brilliant theory, wherein the Rothchilds used space solar generators to fire laser beams, causing fires to tweak their stock market holdings. At the one-year anniversary of the worst health care crisis the United States had faced since the Civil War and the Spanish Flu, certain center state politicos were less concerned with a 1.9 trillion dollar Covid relief bill and more interested in catering to their fears of the growing specter of cancel culture. Rather than focusing on needed assistance to a suffering American public, talking heads were focused on the corporate decisions of toy company Hasbro making Mister Potato Head into a more gender-neutral version. Or Disney Plus adding content advisory disclaimers to archived episodes of The Muppets showcasing negative depictions of non-American cultures. Or Warner Brothers’ decision to omit Looney Tunes character Pepe LePew from LeBron James’ new Space Jam sequel. Or Dr. Seuss’ estate discontinuing earlier works depicting racist imagery. The online outrage was a cacophony. Flabbergasted Middle America was aghast, not comprehending the vast scope of social evolution barreling down the pipe at them. Whiteboys continued their stance of victimization, rhetorically asking where it would all end, pointing fingers at censorship and leftist agenda.
I especially enjoyed their new counter-term of woke supremacy.