Hard Choices

and the choices that aren't hard at all

I understand hard choices.

I'm not going to get into personal detail here, but I really do understand hard choices. I understand doing something that you don't want to do. That you know full well is a bad option. But feeling like there's no other way to do it. Feeling trapped like a rat and knowing that you're going to make vicious rat choices, but also knowing you're in a rat cage. Sometimes vicious rat choices are the only choices available to you.

But we're not in a vicious rat choices situation. We're not trapped. We don't have to let elderly people and disabled people and people with comorbidities like diabetes, or asthma or high blood pressure or ADHD get severe COVID and die because it's our only choice.

We're not Ukraine. We don't have to write our children's names on their bodies in Sharpie because we don't know if we can stay with them. We don't have to choose between enduring hunger and risking death (or rape, or both) at the hands of occupying soldiers.

We have to risk putting a reasonably comfortable N95 Mask on our face. That's the hardship we face. That's the risk we run. Foggy glasses and mask acne. We've decided we would rather abandon our vulnerable people then put loops over our ears. That's the decision that the US and Canada are making.

There has to be something pathological here. Something broken. There has to be a vacancy in our souls. That we perceive something as simple as putting a mask on as the kind of desperate oppression that means we abandon our vulnerable.

This is not a tsunami where we’re not strong enough to grasp both babies. No one has to leave their nonagenarian mother on a mountain in a cave. We’re not abandoning our vulnerable because we have to. We’re abandoning our vulnerable because we want to. Because we’re not strong enough to go to the 7-11 with a mask on.