A year of pandemonium
Pandemonium: noun. wild uproar or unrestrained disorder; tumult or chaos. a place or scene of riotous uproar or utter chaos. the abode of all the demons. hell.
One year ago, the year of pandemonium began. It was nothing cosmic or mythic but everything terrestrial. Deforestation, overpopulation, geopolitics working together to pinball a virus across a planet, infecting the poor to the politicians. Total destruction at the end of a human breath.
In March 2020, we sheltered in place amidst a storm of emotions: disbelief, fear, confusion, panic, powerlessness, regret, despair. Those lightning bolts would strike us again and again in a hazy flash of déjà vu, repeating until they became an ever-present pang no different than hunger or desire. The arthritic pattern of a broken heart with no mend in sight. It was a lockdown that stole our weeks that turned into months that turned into a year. Buried us in (or scattered us away from) the places we called home. A year leading to a generation of lives and dreams and futures swallowed by COVID-19.
I remember the roads being dead silent, the two lanes near my home usually impossible to cross on foot now lay empty for minutes at a time. There was nowhere to go. There was no one to see. In the first weeks even leaving the house for a walk was sin. While supermarket shelves bared their bolts, delivery became as essential a business as it ever could be. The debate over whether takeout food was safe weighed heavy on our minds, and supporting local restaurants became an impossible choice. Gyms, venues, mom+pops, studios went out of business. Some gave up and boarded windows to sit out the year. This isn’t the dystopic paperback you dog eared back in high school. This is America, 2020.
Chains, locking us to our beds where sleep was fitful and colored by tainted dreams. I took to painting my own and other’s panicked dreams as a way to pass the time, to get inside of someone else’s head for a while. After two weeks turned into a month of being homebound, we began to slink outdoors, sometimes in a shadow of shame or fear. I filled the hours after work with different forms of movement, a run, a walk, a bike ride. Anything to get out of the house, anything to regain some power and momentum. In my ear, the fortune of the long months ahead, the song of my year, the rhythmic autotune of “1 more year” promising me salvation in 2021. Upon encountering another human, ducking and crossing the road.
The things that started off as the least convenient — the distancing, the sanitizing, the new normal workdays from bed, long lines for basic groceries, and endlessly lonely nights — were no indication of the terrors that would choke the nation and world. The boring that seemed so painful turned out to be a few weeks of paradise.
Then we dropped into the highest sudden unemployment rates in history, the devastation of decades-old supply chains, the complete and total breakdown of personal finance. Murders, protests, riots, a mob, and 500,000 Americans and 3 million dead across the planet. Healthcare workers sacrificing their lives to duty while basic humanity slipped out the window. Convention centers turned into field hospitals and freezer trucks turned into graveyards. Our future’s inequality gap ever widening, divided by in accessibility to basic human rights: health, food, shelter, education, internet.
I #stayedhome, righteous in my choice while it was truly my privilege that allowed me to opt out of the consequences of the pandemic. I lay in pools of guilt, chipped away from my paycheck and supported any way I could in those confined times. My friends and I fundraised via virtual community dance parties and created a free herbal medicine project to combat COVID symptoms to those in need. Still, staying isolated felt like a shield of armor against the problems that so many others lay bare to. My efforts futile to control the epidemic of hate and chaos broiling beneath lockdowns. Instead of unitng together against a common enemy, deadly and invinsible, we turned against each other in pandemonium.
A year spent in homes and in our heads and on our screens. Equal access to vetted information and click-worthy miseducation, the crisscrossing of irreverence and conspiracy. Digital footpaths predetermined by exploitative algorithms, carrying the naive to their trenches and offering sharp stairs to painful realizations to those of us willing to walk them. A reckoning that shook our skin color right off of us.
A eerie quiet erupting in a battle cry. The streets filled. The good, the bad, the indeterminate. A lie seared into a nation forevermore, a contradiction so deep that it has lost meaning even to itself. The shaking reality of a woman of color sworn into the white house in a mask. A layer cake of disgust, redemption, and viral loads. Rinse and repeat until your skin is cracked. One year has passed.
Meanwhile, the opportunistic used their tools, their words, their works, to amplify those voices and causes demanding it. To spread words and works of truth and pain and even joy and togetherness. In our lonely hours we took worship in our homes and minds and creativity. We welcomed new animals, took on new hobbies and projects, and stargazed towards our dreams from a narrow view of what might be possible in the future. Technology we considered superfluous became our lifeline to see, to hear, to laugh, to cry, to celebrate. Weddings, birthdays, baby showers, first dates, our hearts bled together via LED. While the pandemic wasn’t the great equalizer, the world wet web took its place.
We were grounded for the longest time in our lives. Homes in plane paths wondered how it had ever been so quiet. The wildlife came closer because it was hungrier. Creatures reclaimed highways, canals, rivers… earth became wilder. Meanwhile historical acreages burned on sacred mountain ranges and unexpected freezes stole decades of plantlife and seasons of crops from us. We stayed clear or we got sick and we recovered or we didn’t. We lost. We continue to lose.
We suck and savor at the before times like the last bit of marrow. But while we want our lives and our busy schedules and inevitably, our traffic jams, back, realize that this year may have contained the gasps of cleanest air humans will ever naturally breathe again. The planet, very much like us healed while it burned.
The greatest minds of our generation present to us the hope of a life we once had, in a vial. Where there is hope there is technology, there is science, and there are those trusted with the responsibility of drawing hard lines. At least 1/4 of our country is now vaccinated. 1/10 of our country has recovered from COVID. 1/200th has died from it. The rest of us are stuck in some ratio game counting the days til we hug our grandparents, or hell, even a stranger. But we know it’s coming, and we are more grateful than we’ve ever been. Because the end is in sight, a year of pandemonium later.
