Some of you have never watched someone you love die of respiratory disease.
Some of you have never been awake at 3:30 on Thursday night, wondering how you were going to make sure all your payroll checks cleared when you passed them out on Friday.
Some of you have never travelled to a place where the government tells you what to wear, when to go out, who to associate with, and what to say every waking hour.
Some of you were not raised by people who lived through the depression, who know what life is like when the whole world's economy grinds to a halt.
Some of you have never held the hand of a 25 year old, listening to the life rattle out of his shrunken chest.
Or built a company on nothing but a plan and hard work, only to have politicians shut it down.
Or woke up with a prowler standing in your bedroom.
Or spent the night in the ER on oxygen because the person in the next cubicle came to work with the flu.
Some of you have never tried to imagine how terrified people are who are lie awake thinking about different demons than yours.
And it shows.
We're all scared shitless. Some of us are afraid we're going to die. Others because we might infect someone else and they could die. Some of us are afraid that the company we dreamed into existence will not survive another week of social isolation. Some are afraid that the job they left won't be there when the Angel of Corona finally passes over. And others remember our grandparents stories of scrounging coal from the railroad tracks so they could light the stove and heat the house and make coffee on winter mornings before the whole family, parents, grandparents, and children went out in the snowy streets looking for work.
Of course we're scared shitless. We'd be insane not to be. We're just all scared of different things.
Let's put aside the whole idea of "I refuse to live in fear." We know it's a lie before we click the send button. Of course we're afraid.
And it shows.
It shows in how quick to take offense we are. In how hard it is to feel like we've been heard and understood. It shows in how impossible it is to understand how people can make the choices that they make, or accept the limits they accept. It shows in the way our influencers tickle and trigger our fears to keep us alert and on edge and obedient. It shows in our lashing out. Our refusal to acknowledge doubts. Our hatred of strangers. Our deathly fear of getting it wrong and sinking in the storm.
But, fear will not get us through the storm. Fear IS the storm.
Each one of us is afraid, and nobody else can ever really understand what it's like to feel what we feel. Calling someone a fool because they don't fear the same things as you is like you telling them that they don't have a toothache because you have a sprained ankle.
There is no victory for us to win here. This war is lost. The field is littered with dead bodies and dead business and dead dreams and there are no winners in the Time of Corona. There will only be survivors.
But how will we survive? By winning the argument or the election? By breaking one another's hearts and wills? Will we survive by trying and failing to convince half of our neighbors that they are stupid? Will that leave us a world that was worth fighting for?
Or will we walk out of the valley knowing that we found a way to help one another through the dark?
Fear won't get us through. Love will get us through. Respect will get us through. Listening. Caring. Compassion for one another will get us through the Time of Corona. Love someone enough to believe that their fear is real, even if you can't feel a drop of it. Care about someone enough to know that they had a good reason to vote that way, even if you can't make a lick of sense of it. Feel for someone enough to help them find their own courage and strength, even if you aren't sure either of you has a crumb of either. Corona will never be a blessing. But we can learn how to bless one another, even if it really is the end of the world.
If we can't learn that, if we can't learn to love each other, fears and all, we will have wasted the Time of Corona.
We may survive. But not as winners. We will be the most contemptible kind of losers. And you're damn right it will show.
