Okay, let me just skip a few months. I planned on publishing this several months ago and life just kept throwing curveballs.
So, listen up, I'm not going to take the time to be nice and skirt around controversial words and avoid hurting feelings. You can ask my friends and co-workers, I have a morbid sense of humor many find shocking. Part of what it makes it work is my idiopathic nerves, in that I don't actually care how my audience may get offended at times, context pending.
So, this year started off like Stephen King's The Stand. The way I joked to people about it was sounding like a radio announcer giving the gist of the book in a comparative way to the virus. People who never read were surprised by how far ahead King wrote. Almost immediately after the pandemic and lockdowns were conspiracies flooding in. Some sounded vaguely plausible (some in the long-term sense), others laughably insane (might explain why sanitariums are no longer in use). After that, mixing with racial tensions not seen for decades, we have a powder keg of a nation. Now, people are literally going around being emotional terrorists, cussing out anyone wearing a mask, threatening lawsuits for medical reasons, and trashing retail stores for selling face masks. You can look up any of these on youtube, there's many "Karen compilation" videos of each. Or, as I prefer to call them, "Teri," in anti-honor of the racist lady in a viral video who proclaimed pride of being a white woman having white power.
So much for 2020 being the Year of Enlightenment.
People these days are showing not just a lack of enlightenment, but also of compassion and thoughtfulness. Upon hearing the coronavirus was from China and there was persecution of (and racial attacks against) Chinese people, I made a direct challenge toward anyone who called themselves "good," if you see yourself as a good person, it's time to prove and step up to help those who get trampled upon. Now, later in the year, videos show people using so many racial epithets like we're back in the 1930-50's. No concern about being recorded on video. No concern about being recorded making false crime statements with the intention of getting (I'm going to just say it, I'm not caring enough to skirt around the issue) a black person in trouble just because a white person is scared of the existence of a black person instead of taking a chance to make a new friend.
All this in the same year that, just last December, people were always making jokes about having perfect insight and 20/20 vision. In my sight, we have not progressed at all. I was suspicious that these issues never died off, just went into hibernation. I'm saddened every day that my guess was right. Speaking of guesses... when I heard that the virus was to be done and everything would be good by May (heard it in February), I wanted to laugh. That implied people would follow rules. I've yet to see a strong case for that, I just see strong cases of people not doing that. Also had a famous megachurch pastor (Kenneth Copeland) make a now famous "prophecy" of the coronavirus being destroyed by a heat wave in... May? Really? The same time? Well, that didn't work. The same week he declared the prophecy, God gave him a different kind of burn. A polar vortex giving all of America one last big snowstorm before Colorado would get a strange string of snowstorms. It is written in God's word to call out false prophets. Yes, Copeland, you're a fake. As fake as false religion impersonating God's love and showing evil instead.
Those who see the evidence of the virus, who knows people who've contacted (I've had coworkers and friends who tested positive, some recovered, others I haven't heard yet), and are going with the rules they don't care for (not a fan of the mask, but will wear, despite my asthma) have a "'rona bucket list" of things to do when all is done. It does feel impossible to wait.
So... what's a polyglot bookworm with a taste for creepy movies, video games, and an Autistic Christian to do with this global insanity?
