Category: haiku

A hurricane has landed, but it’s hard to notice. The Republican National Convention is dominating national headlines, perhaps because people are interested to see how our political parties are going to respond to the uprising, which is itself a response to COVID-19 and years of police brutality and centuries of capitalism. In California, people are more worried about the massive fires, made worse by the inability to use prison labor because of COVID-19. In cities across the country, people are more worried about how the uprising and economic downturn due to COVID-19 are affecting their psychic and physical landscape.

So Hurricane Laura, a category 4 storm and the largest to hit the United States this year, will probably never make the front page news for most people. Hurricane Laura has been eclipsed by the hurricane of our social breakdown. What happens when we can’t see each others’ trauma because our own is so central, and visceral? What I’m seeing, in calls with friends and family, is increasing denial that anything bad is even happening at all, likely because people feel increasingly powerless to do much about the increasingly supercharged collapse of everything comforting they’d built their lives around. So it’s now that much easier for those in power to reconfigure memory and reality, since everyone is so desperate to cling to whatever false promises of safety and progress are thrown their way. I suppose this is how institutions like capitalism and patriarchy have always reproduced themselves, but it’s stunning to witness in real time.

i wonder what we
will call this land after the
uprising succeeds

I’m almost trembling as I write this, because the situation that lies ahead has become so clear and terrifying. While the comedians on Saturday Night Live joke about COVID-19 as something happening only in China or Italy, cases are appearing in Seattle and north of New York City. With an R rate of 2-4, and almost no testing for the virus, this means that many more people certainly have the disease. And older people are horribly at risk. My partner and I cried and held each other as we realized that one of our grandparents would almost certainly succumb to COVID-19, given how badly prepared the country was.

I have nothing but furor for De Blasio, Cuomo, and Trump, who’ve all certainly known about this disease for at least a month, and who have likely ignored the screaming urgency of their epidemiologists as they demand the country, the state, and the city do anything at all to keep people safe. Deep breaths are not going to save us (as Cuomo suggested to his daughter); only closing everything down and providing adequate face coverings and testing will do anything. In the face of staggering government inaction, I’m desperately trying to figure out what I can do to keep my friends and family safe. In the meantime I can only stock up on personal supplies and research the virus more and watch as a wave comes hurdling towards shore, certain to overwhelm the miniscule flood walls we’ve put up to defend ourselves.

staring at the moon
wondering whether it weeps
when it sees our plight