Today is hard for a number of reasons. National news is filled with people hurting each other and bad administrative responses. There are riots in Minnesota that make my heart hurt because I think people have every right to be angry and I wish that they hadn’t been hurt /trapped so badly that rioting seemed like the best option. I wish there were more funds and will for police departments to make sure that the demographics of the police force matches the demographics of the people they are in charge of. It isn’t a full solution, but it is a concrete and measurable step that can be taken. The president just pulled funding from the World Health Organization in the middle of a pandemic because he is unhappy that they didn’t respond how he wanted them to. That doesn’t feel like the right move to me, though I support investigation. My president also picked a fight with social media companies. Again, it is a national conversation we need to be having: what is the responsibilities of social media in deciding what information gets spread and what gets removed. Yet the worst possible framing for that discussion is to make it an angry, partisan argument.
Locally, we just had the biggest ever jump in new cases. Yesterday was the highest new-case count we’d ever had at 215, but that was in line with numbers we’ve had for a month. Today there were 343 new cases. Four days after Memorial Day where people had family parties, went to public places, went to restaurants, went to malls. There are still people who became infected over the weekend who don’t know it yet, and some wards will be having their first meetings in months this coming weekend. It feels like a potential one two punch that spirals the virus out of control locally.
Howard is having a reasonable breathing day today, but the past two days were bad. Every bad breathing day forces us to face that this is our normal for now. We have pulmonary function testing scheduled next week, but the results of that test could be anything from “Let’s order more tests” to “huh, that’s weird” to “here is a treatment plan so you can get better” to “here is a terrible, permanently-life-altering diagnosis.” Health related anxieties are running high. And there isn’t anything we can do other than wait for the test.
So with all the hard things, I’m staying away from the internet today. I’m finishing cabinets, and I plan to watch a movie with my people. Oh and I’m admitting out loud that things feel hard today. Because sometimes that happens.