Surviving An Apocalypse

Thanksgiving. It should be a time of giving thanks for the blessings in our lives, for the people that surround us and support us, and for the simplest of things. However, this year is bound to be a different kind of Thanksgiving as the world rests in the clutches of a pandemic. In the United States this year many people feel less thankful than ever before. Why wouldn't we feel this way? Take a look at what we've had to see and endure since the last holiday season.

In December of 2019, the country was in the midst of a booming economic time with consumer confidence at arguably a record high. Whether you believe it or not, look back to 2019, and what were your concerns? Gas prices were lower than they had been for several years and this meant it cost you less to get where you were going. Unemployment was lower than it had been in many American communities. The President of the United States was about to fight an impeachment that many wondered how our country would look afterward. Fast forward just a few months.

By March 13th, 2020 we were all faced with the spiraling pandemic and the new term in our lives, Covid-19. Our politicians were arguing as they always do and I expect will continue to do, long after I'm dust in the wind. The President had closed the country off to incoming air travel, effectively sealing the borders around us. We watched as his detractors called him xenophobic, racist, and an isolationist as he was faced with something no president has faced since the early nineteen hundreds. Dr. Fauci stood in front of the cameras, a leading expert in his field, and told us we needed to socially distance from others, stay in our homes and on our properties and only go to work if we had to. He warned of the coming calamity if we didn't cooperate as we could see as many as two and a half million deaths by fall, a number we thankfully avoided.

We sat through the rest of March, April, and into early May. We watched as the world changed in such a short time. There were no smiles as people started to dawn masks. We would later learn that due to the perceived shortage in face masks, we were lied to, to protect first responders and the medical community. That would not be the first lie we the people would learn of. A growing feeling of anger, mistrust, and despair swept across our nation as it did our planet. Many people drowning in work, the number of people contracting the virus growing at an unprecedented speed. Others drowned in fear as they faced the sudden collapse of the economy, businesses closed and many would not return.

Just as the numbers began to go down in cases, the unthinkable would happen and America, a powder keg waiting for a light, exploded after the events in Minneapolis involving four policemen and a suspect. We watched the Summer of Blood play out on our televisions and in our media. The leaders pointed fingers, those that had been in leadership in the country the longest pointing them the very most at those that had been in the roles far less time. The blame game was on and it was on full speed as cities burned, innocents were attacked and people were murdered. Fear, much like the Covid-19 virus, spread through the world like a cancer. Our world was being torn asunder on two fronts.

Round two of the lockdowns or mitigations has taken its' hold on the country and there are still many unanswerable questions about the year behind us. The horror of it all, the inescapable feeling that the world was coming to an end, the fear of losing those that matter to a disease with a spread only stopped by your neighbors, your friends, your cashiers, your gas station workers and so many others' judgment about the recommended things to help stop the spread.

Out of fear, forced changes, and dire uncertainty, people found their way to nature. Friends sat around in back yards, avoiding the pitfalls or ventilation not being good, people learned to elbow bump, even bowing slightly to replace the common handshake. In places that needed to stay open, they adapted to take out, finding their fans would come to them. Door Dash took off in small areas like mine, making it almost unnecessary to leave home.

I don't know how those of us that survived this year did so unscathed or with our sanity intact, but I'm glad I did. I don't know how you did, but I went fishing and spent a lot of time with my son, my brother, my son's girlfriend and her little boy. I taught a 47-year-old how to fish, got back into an old hobby I hadn't done much of in years and became a surrogate grandfather figure to what will I'm sure someday be my first grandchild. We all pulled together, all of us at different times finding new problems to conquer in this strange new world we were living in. Where would any of us really be, without those nearest and dearest?

So, for Thanksgiving 2020, I'm thankful for the same things I was in 2019. I'm thankful for the new youngster that's a part of our family. The new career I decided to try after nearly twenty-five years in Law Enforcement. Yes, I managed to start a new career in the midst of a pandemic, proving anything is possible. Most of all, I'm thankful that we are all going to make it into 2021, because ancient writings tell of the apocalypse being the ending of things as they are known before the beginning of a new world in its' place. By god, if 2020 isn't heralding a new world in the next years, I'll be surprised.