Pandemic Plight by Ron Williams

I am robbed of the common practice of hugging those around me, whether they are friends, colleagues, or strangers (because to me every stranger is a potential friend). This is happening, not just because of the pandemic, but the way in which we as citizens have become vociferously transactional, and are more concerned about our freedom and liberty, than the collective health and healing of our nation. I sat and watched Donald J. Trump during the debate regarding this plague as something of a plaything. I sit in my house, sometimes feeling confined within my warm and comfortable home, because I cannot go to The Bun Shop and sit with my Vietnamese coffee and write, because I cannot go to a concert, or a festival, or a poetry reading because everything has become virtual, and mechanic, and digital, and removed, because I cannot sit with my students in my ethics class in our Socratic circle, engaging with each other, feeling the walls reverberate with laughter, and love, and catharsis. My emotions roll and crash like turbulent seas, and I experience the exhaustion from not existing in my fullness, in my grace, in my merit, in all the ways it honors me. My cranium aches from the deluge of rhetorical madness from which the people around me are struggling, falling, drowning, clashing. There is more violence, more pollution, more trash, more animosity around me in ways that even the perpetrators are not aware. It is as if the wild is converging on itself, and I am the scribe who is taking it all in and wishing the four elements of the earth can scrub it away.