gotta get some bummer thoughts out.
i don’t know what i should be feeling. there’s relief that we got through the first wave, happiness for warm air and sunshine. but there were a lot of sirens yesterday and it’s hard not to feel paranoid about that. i don’t want to go back to hearing sirens every 20 minutes throughout the entire day. during the peak, it was non-stop, one after the other, day after day.
it’s a an odd thing, because normally you don’t notice the sirens in new york. but you never knew what they’re for – a heart attack, a bike accident – it could be anything. this time you knew exactly what all of those sirens meant. and every one of them stings.
there’s the constant frustration of not knowing what’s happening around the country. are daily cases increasing? deaths? hospitalizations? the dashboards i used to check daily are no longer accurate – our reporting infrastructure is broken, and some states are intentionally misreporting (if they’re even collecting the data). the US has no trustworthy authorities. the CDC has bungled basic guidelines too many times. it’s every state for themselves out there.
even the “established” sources of information feel woefully irrelevant now. it’s not that i doubt their facts, but their editorial strategy is just so ineffective. it’s brutal to read the NYT and Wapo as they flail impotently, whinging about Trump while clinging to this failed idea that journalism should be objective and impartial. to me, their entire brand is summed up by one of their senior editors proclaiming without the slightest hint of irony that he doesn’t vote because that would compromise his journalistic integrity.
i burned out on doing my own research, which involved digging through twitter to find quality takes from epidemiologists and statisticians and journalists watching other countries. it just takes so much work to find qualified experts with well-formed opinions on each new problem. once i hit the brick wall of “nobody seems to know if antibody tests are worth anything” i ran out of gas.
it’s no wonder that conspiracy theories are exploding right now. we don’t have a shared source of truth. it’s been decades since we had that, i guess, but now that illusion has faded, so people are inventing their own truths.
the intense daily sadness of early quarantine has faded. now, it’s just the throbbing ache of living in a crumbling country.