Azalea Season (Week Fifty-Nine)

I woke up early and went to the park, where the white tulips were busy preparing for a parade of azaleas.    

This was the week when all the plants and trees seemed to exhale as they rolled out their leaves.

The tentative phase of spring was over. The main event had begun.  

I spotted an azalea I had never seen (or at least didn't remember seeing) because it was hidden behind a wall.  

I asked myself whether I was looking forward to the summer and then decided it was the wrong question to ask. 

In fact, I was already dreading the summer. It wasn't just the heat, although that's always a good thing to dread. It was the litany of amazing things everyone was planning to do this summer to 'make up' for last summer. The mayor said that the city would be completely open by July 1; the newspapers were filled with warnings to book your beach house early; friends and family were discussing trips to wherever. Brunches were on the schedule. The good life was resuming. 

Expectations could not be higher, which is always a questionable strategy but seemed particularly risky given the number of cases around the world. Was it really over for us? Maybe. 

My qualms about rejoining society were somewhat different. Over the course of the pandemic, I've become more afraid, not of the virus, but of people; or more specifically, our institutions. Which is a hard thing to admit, because I believe in government -- like there's nothing I want more than a BIG government that spends money on healthcare and parks and clean jobs and libraries and etc (as opposed to tax cuts for the rich, weapons, and jails) -- and I find it increasingly difficult to reconcile this belief with the utter failure of our government to take care of (most of) its people over the course of not only the pandemic but also ... well, pretty much my entire life, which has coincided with the dismantling of the New Deal and its replacement by the neoliberal framework that continues to define most of our politics. But even within that framework, the last year has been a shock. Before going through it, I never would have believed that, as a country, we could allow hundreds of thousands of people to die while making only the most minimal adjustments to a system that for the most treats these lives as disposable, a cost of doing business. Another shock was to realize that this statement is true outside of the context of the virus. Even in the park, I couldn't escape a sense that we are failing ourselves.  

But secretly I kept hoping for one of the azaleas to prove me wrong.