What Saddens Me Most Right Now

Aside from the fact that the markets have not held a moratorium so that governments can better focus on managing a global crisis

credit: pixabay

This past Saturday I attended the funeral service of one of our revered and loved elders in the family in Brooklyn, NY. She died in her 93rd year on earth and out of her 7 daughters, 5 were present and openly weeping, one was hospitalized and the other unable to travel due to restrictions. My great aunt’s final resting place will be in Jamaica and right now the logistics of this has become a shaky proposition at the moment. If there is a wedding, graduation, reunion, or funeral in my family you can expect to see a minimum of hundred or more attendees who are mostly blood relatives — barely a third of that figure was present for this occasion. While her daughters that were present were briefly comforted by my presence; by sharing memorable moments of their mother’s life, and shared mourning of their loss, there was the additional eerie sadness brewing like an overarching cloud of despair that covid-19 has brought upon us too.

It saddens me how the risk and dangers of covid-19 has seemingly divided us, and has us mandatorily isolated, leaving us captive by its swift invasion.

What saddens me also is how a preponderance of us humans behave when faced with a pandemic, especially here in the U.S. that contibutes to our capture by this deadly menace. The lack of American spirit as a collective has left us vulnerable to such attacks. This lack of care is lost on many, just for example, in the way we hoard supplies (fear-based or not) creating artificial scarcity and t hen there are some who act simply out of self interest and opportunistically turn around and resell them at preposterously higher prices above retail value — further exacerbating an artificial scarcity in many instances.

Victims to misfortune or those who fall prey to unfortunate events in no way deserve what befalls them. That sort of just-world theorizing is ludicrous, and looking to cast aspersions, or lay blame on what is essentially the dualism of nature (or the yin and yang of nature, if you will), of random undesirable events that impact broader society in negative ways and outcomes, will surely and only reverberate as a…