I’m thankful I took so well to academia after returning. My greatest fear was being stuck at the same place where I grew up, and COVID made it come true. Everything was closed, there was nowhere to go. Even once things reopened, the threat of infection cooled any thoughts of outings. As someone who had no health insurance and morbid obesity, I knew I had to be careful. As far as I know, I was—but as we know now, being careful wasn’t enough sometimes. Some people didn’t have the luxury of staying cooped up. Bills still needed paying, and if everyone stayed home then society would’ve surely collapsed.
The mistreatment of so-called ‘essential workers’ will be one of the biggest sins of this century in retrospect, I have no doubt. And for once, the blame can be squarely lain upon specific people. Business owners, magnates, executives with control who chose to go for profit, not people. The risk was unavoidable, but the reward was pathetic. My stance on killing others is simple: it’s never right, whether you’re person or policy. I don’t want those who left essential workers out to dry and die to end. I want them to face justice, and spend the rest of their lives in a cell, only leaving to get a breath of fresh air in the yard so they never forget what freedom looks like.
It’ll never happen, I know that. Maybe as a society we’ll change for the better, but change isn’t quick and a lot of the perpetrators aren’t young. But that’s life; it’s not fundamentally just. There’s no grand plan or objective morality. We just live as we can, and try to make this brief time of consciousness worth it.
I apologize for getting so preachy. But when I think of COVID, I think of how scary it was, not knowing. Sure, it wasn’t a huge mortality rate. A lot of people got it and survived. But you never knew how it’d turn out. Every cough, every headache was a spike of fear. A lot of people like me died, and they died horribly. One stands out, a man I never met named Jarod Nandin. He was perhaps most known for his accurate cosplay of the infamous ‘no lifer’ from the South Park episode ‘Make Love, Not Warcraft.’ An active member of the Blizzard community, it’s entirely possible I played a game or two with him and didn’t know. He was a perfect example of a good gaming fan: a little silly, a little too passionate, but by all accounts a good guy.
He first had chest pains, then he devolved into having his oxygen levels dropping. He even joked about his cosplay in his final message to the public. “How do you kill that which has no life?”
The picture he had attached looked like me, and he had my sense of humor. I felt sorrow for the loss his friends and family suffered, but I also felt fear because it really could be that easy for me to be the one laying there, with tubes in my face, panic that won’t go away and knowing that no matter what I do, I’ll be dead before long. That’s the cruelty of COVID, the fear it spawned. People might argue it was ‘just a bad flu,’ but hasn’t history been proof that in the right circumstances, a minor thing can have a massive impact? COVID changed us, and not for the better. Today, I wonder how lasting those changes are.
