At the Edge

In speaking with friends and acquaintances, I am getting the sense that something much bigger is upon us. It’s as if a detour sign was fifty feet high with large red lights blinking brightly in the darkness warning us to stop and turn around or risk going off into a deep inescapable cliff.

We’ve been told for nearly two years that “normalcy” is just around the corner. But that corner keeps shifting. Normalcy is just around the corner, they say as they proceed to completely re-define what exactly is normal. Like the weather, if we wait ten minutes, normal changes, incessantly, relentlessly and without accountability.

When I lived in Los Angeles we would have a small tremor, maybe a 3.5 or so. And those little tremors terrified me because I feared that the big one may be just winding up. And sometimes I was right and therefore justified in my anxiety.

This time of pandemic has been a long series of tremor after tremor. I sense a consistent state of anxiety all around me. “What’s next?” is the central question. “What could possibly be next?”

I’ve noticed it in weird ways. One most notable is bad driving. I’ve had more near misses in the last year than I could count in over twenty years. I was talking to a woman in Texas and she had noted the same. My daughter will tell you that she has nearly been hit, to include a near head-on collision, several times. My sister said her son almost got T-Boned. I don’t know if that’s a symptom of general recklessness or a deep seated collective nihilism.

I keep wondering what the limits are? Crime has surged, that’s a fact. Divorce rates are up. Alcohol and other substances are in great demand. Every day there’s another story of someone being subdued on an airplane. Domestic violence has reached epidemic proportions.

People are losing their jobs due to vaccine hesitancy. The mandates have been rolled out with stunning ham-handedness. Finances are being strained if not decimated. Parents, whose children were home for nearly a year have noticed them struggling to catch up to grade level. Anecdotes are abundant regarding social awkwardness when kids do participate in person. There’s a teacher shortage, a bus driver shortage and a shortage in all school personnel. At ground level, stores are posting warnings about shortages. Christmas is being threatened. People are just tired of this never ending slow grind.

There have been many skirmishes. Small uprisings and larger protests, walk outs and stop work. There is a simmering tension now but it will explode if, or should I say when, a vaccine mandate for five to eleven year old kids comes down. And it will come down. It won’t be the federal government mandating it, it will be the federal government forcing the states to do it. And that might prove to be even more dangerous because some states won’t mandate children be vaccinated and others will, and that patchwork of mandates will create more anger, more fear and more unrest than if it were a federal mandate.

A patchwork approach to child vaccination will create greater anger as people who live in New York or California see their counterparts in Florida and Texas not under mandatory child vaccination.

There is a very large “parent” network that’s been created during the course of the shut-down. I follow some of them in various states. Parents are communicating and sharing information across various platforms. As someone who spent most of her professional career organizing “grassroots education and response” I find these efforts very impressive. Parents are using technology to instigate rapid response to an issue and educating one another on latest trends.

One only has to look to recent events in Loudoun County, Virginia. A Loudoun County woman learns from the video testimony of another woman at a school board meeting in Texas about questionable materials in public schools and it prompts her to see if the same is happening in Loudoun County. That in turn leads to a man in Pennsylvania taking a harder look at his kid’s public school curriculum. This prompts his brother in Indiana to do the same.

If the mandate, which is coming, is not equally applied, it will cause extreme anger and frustration. It will ripen an already existing spirit of unrest that will spread coast to coast. In my mind I am imagining the Yellow Vest protests that gripped France three years ago and continued until Covid hit in March 2020. But these protests will be even more intense because it won’t be the government screwing with your pocket book, it will be the government screwing with your kids.

The tremors are happening right now, the question is how big will that earthquake be and what will be the ultimate consequence? And I am praying that somebody at that highest level is calculating the cost-benefit and makes prudent, not emotional, decisions.