I’ve genuinely had it. Enough.
Last week a woman called in to excitedly exclaim how great it was to watch her kid graduate from High School on a ski resort chair lift, safely distanced from his fellow students.
This weekend I saw multiple Instagram posts celebrating the fact that kids played soccer…while they stayed 6 feet away from each other the entire game, and parents stayed in their cars, and anyone who wasn’t playing wore masks.
Meanwhile, a few banquet halls, golf courses, and events centers started encouraging people to make their reservations now for holiday parties. After seeing that, if I’ve laughed harder in 2020, I certainly can’t remember when that was.
Stop.
As I said weeks ago, and we are demonstrating on a daily basis, we are in an abusive relationship and there is absolutely nothing about that to be celebrated.
Sadly, our show has an extensive history and intimate knowledge of what abusive relationships look like. Dawn has been painfully honest about being in one herself decades ago; we have worked with people caught in them; we have volunteered and/or trained with domestic violence support centers; and sadly, we have taken too many calls and read too many letters from too many people trapped in them. And now, we are all trapped in one.
One of the hallmarks of an abusive relationship is delusion mixed with an endless need to find any sort of positivity and then cling to it as though it represents hope. On the night he doesn’t beat her to a pulp, she suddenly thinks he’s changed, or she’s behaved finally. Either way, she brags to her friends that she had a great night with her amazing man. No one, including her, says anything about the black eye that is still healing from 2 days earlier, or her trembling hands, as she knows, deep down, that there is absolutely no reason for her alleged happiness.
We are her and it’s time to admit it. There is absolutely nothing to celebrate about placing young adults on chair lifts for a bogus and asinine “graduation” where they get to the top of a mountain and are given their diploma by a lone principal and parents watch the event from their cars via a live stream. There is nothing to be happy about kids playing soccer while making sure to remain 6 feet apart and everyone around them looks like some sort of hazardous waste removal technician. By the way, if you’ve never played soccer you may not know that you can’t actually play soccer while maintaining 6 feet of distance. That’s not soccer, it’s an exhibition on dribbling. It’s beyond ludicrous and should be shamed and repudiated.
We have been so beaten down that we are not only accepting never-ending abuse, we are, in fact, raising our collective glasses to toast things that only 4 months ago we would have rightly mocked, demeaned, and dismissed as idiotic and un-American.
And that is the new test. Anytime I hear anyone celebrate anything moving forward, I am going to view it through the prism of February, 2020. If we were told then that this summer kids would be playing soccer, essentially alone, while not actually playing soccer, we would have asked if it was some sort of ceremony to celebrate a visiting foreign country called Idiotkastan.
Continuing the victim playbook, we collectively continue to think things will get better…at some point. A friend last week told me that she’s planning a big public event in August and I did a spit take on her with my martini. And now, events centers want you to believe you’re going to have holiday parties. Allow me to grab you by the lapels and shake some sense into you; the Aftershock concert is NOT happening in October. Halloween is NOT going to be normal. The NFL, if it even plays, is NOT going to be enjoyable to watch. Get a grip and come to terms with our miserable existence and stop trying to make things not worth celebrating, celebratory.
The PGA has had a player test positive (and the sports world is apoplectic with fear), no one is watching Nascar, Major League Baseball can’t even agree on if, how, and when to play any sort of season, and countless NFL players are testing positive for the flu….errr….I mean Covid-19, while Herr Fauci declares that there’s basically no way the NFL can pull off a season this fall on his watch.
Meanwhile, if you protest in large groups with no social distancing and few people wearing masks for a noble cause you’re celebrated and encouraged. This Coronavirus is quite altruistic in picking its’ victims.
We are being abused. And we are not only taking it, we are encouraging it and making it worse. By insisting on pretending to be happy over the small little breadcrumbs we’re given, we are the problem. We hear idiotic, meaningless phrases like “let’s make the best of a bad situation,” and “when life gives you lemons, make lemonade!”
Shut the hell up.
We have been lied to, coerced, manipulated, and intimidated. Our lives have literally been stolen from us and the few things we’re “allowed” to do are nothing to celebrate. It is ironic that we live in a time when seemingly, finally, we are having a serious discussion about improving racial equality in America, something that stretches all the way back to our founding when we owned, sold, and traded people that look like my wife as slaves. In that time, slaves welcomed any sort of grace or mercy their owners showed them, for it was the only glimpse of actual life they had. They spent their time watching their white masters live life and knew what they were being deprived of…as do we. We know better. It was only four months ago we were living, now we’re merely breathing and we’re all shackled. It’s reprehensible. The only thing more despicable is that we’re allowing it to happen. Enjoy your black eye. #none of our lives matter.
