{"id":20678,"date":"2022-01-12T10:37:29","date_gmt":"2022-01-12T15:37:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/?p=20678"},"modified":"2022-01-12T10:37:29","modified_gmt":"2022-01-12T15:37:29","slug":"all-out-of-consolation-probably-a-supply-chain-issue","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2022\/01\/12\/all-out-of-consolation-probably-a-supply-chain-issue\/","title":{"rendered":"All out of Consolation, probably a supply chain issue"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

This column<\/a> by Rory Kinnear in the Grauniad made me cry.\r\n

I mean, a lot of stuff makes me cry these days, so maybe it\u2019s not a big deal, but I found it really moving, particularly the bit where he talks about how, in that Spring of 2020, it felt like everyone was willing to make those extraordinary efforts to combat the pandemic. Not really everybody, of course. But so many people, all doing what needed to be done. Saving, almost certainly, millions of lives.\r\n

And I\u2019m crying, in large part, because I would like to be part of that effort this winter, and I don\u2019t know how. I don\u2019t want to give things up just to give them up. If it\u2019s not going to actually help anybody for me to avoid physical visits with friends or to wear the less-comfortable-but-slightly-more-effective masks, then I don\u2019t want to do it just to feel like I\u2019m helping.\r\n

I think that\u2019s also why I\u2019m so angry about the shift that has happened to relying on individual households purchasing their own at-home test kits and testing themselves all the time\u2014obviously, I can\u2019t actually purchase kits at the local store, so that\u2019s an issue, and then I\u2019m made aware that adding $150 a month on test kits is a very different proposition for most households, even if our household could manage it (if, of course, it were possible to buy tests for ready money). But also, it feels like a colossal, cultural effort to say: screw everybody else, I pulled neg for the night and I\u2019m going to the club. And at the same time, I also feel like if I don\u2019t<\/i> participate in that culture, then all my favorite restaurants and theaters and hardware stores and bakeries and furniture stores will have to close. \r\n

And\u2014I think there\u2019s a real chance that we are at or nearly at the peak of this particular wave, locally. Not nationally, but in Connecticut, and maybe in the Northeast. And if that\u2019s true, I will be relieved, for me and my workplace and my local shops and so forth, but I will feel even more selfish about that relief, as it gets worse in other parts of the country and the world.\r\n

And then\u2026 There\u2019s a joke, in California, when the whole coastline drops in to the ocean, the last words said by the last person standing on the last sinking reef will be \u201cWell, this wasn\u2019t the Big One\u201d. And I still feel like COVID-19, for all its death and destruction and whatever long-term problems we have no idea about yet, isn\u2019t the Big One. Fifteen years ago, I wrote this<\/a> in a bunch of places: \u201cI think that the impact of climate change over the next hundred and fifty years will be on the same scale as the first hundred and fifty years of the Little Ice Age of the Thirteenth Century, together with the Great Famine and the Black Death that followed it.\u201d What I saw in the Spring of 2020 made me think that maybe we could get ready for that and mitigate the worst of it, and now I think I was wrong. Maybe I\u2019m wrong now! Maybe I\u2019m wrong about the whole thing. I\u2019m often wrong about things.\r\n

But my Lord, when Rory Kinnear writes about the consolation in the manifest absences\u2014I just would like some consolation of some kind. You know?\r\n\r\n

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,<\/I>
-Vardibidian.\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In Which Your Humble Blogger weeps, as usual.","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[201,202],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20678","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-navel-gazing","category-news-item"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20678","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20678"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20678\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20679,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20678\/revisions\/20679"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20678"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20678"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20678"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}