A few words from a California shut-in

Staying alive? Yep, that's what I'm trying to do. How about you?

Though sometimes I'm not sure exactly why.

I started this blog ten years ago when I was contemplating aging -- mine, and other people's. I was exploring what conscious aging would be, how to enjoy it, and how to inspire others not to give up and sink into their couches to watch whatever was on television, and develop arthritis, or worse yet, Alzheimer's. 

I was 66 years old, and at the time I was living in New Mexico, where death is part of the rough, desert landscape where nuclear weapons are buried and cow's skulls are sometimes placed above doorways. 

A few years later, I moved back to Sonoma County, the place I call home, where I had raised my kids in the little rural town of Occidental. Here, death is still in the closet, one of the things people don't like to talk about because it's too negative.

Now, like everyone who doesn't have an essential job, laid off from my part time work as a teacher of older adults in the local community college, I'm sheltering in place.

I've come back to this blog to share what that means to me as a member of the vulnerable generation that is also known as the boomers.

I've always been a writer. I have stacks of journals in my closet and pages from unfinished manuscripts about various topics as well as columns written for the local newspapers and published articles about the environment, feminism, and, most recently, organic farming.

I've been waiting for a time like this. Like many others, I spent the sixties envisioning a future without nuclear bombs, in which we would live in greater attunement with nature, a world of conscious awakening, love, and equality, all the good things we saw in a flash and fully expected to realize in our lifetimes. But gradually it became apparent that this transformation was going to take a long time. My daughter would say, and has often told me, it's not going to happen, mom.

Climate change loomed on the horizon, and our society seemed incapable of coping with it, just as we had failed to cope with nuclear bombs; and it became apparent that the existing order was going to have to unravel before a new age could take shape.

I thought a depression would be far better than a nuclear war. In 1999, Y2K looked promising. We were going to be forced to change. But that problem was solved, and instead we endured the life shattering experience of 9-11.

The world changed, but not in the direction we had imagined. The experience of the sixties and seventies had been too shocking for the establishment. A backlash followed, dominated by globalization, neoliberalism, and endless wars. Meanwhile, the climate deteriorated, and it became obvious that it was an emergency with a deadline: ten years to change our ways, or die.

Now we have something that threatens to bring about the economic collapse and the possible disruption of our culture.

A plague.

At first, I confess, I was happy about it.

I often think about the story of the exodus from Egypt celebrated every year around this time at Passover, how Moses was given the task of freeing the Jews from slavery, and how the Pharaoh resisted. So the Lord devastated Egypt with a succession of plagues. With each one, a despairing Pharaoh agreed to yield, but then God "hardened his heart" and Pharaoh changed his mind.  It took seven plagues for him to finally give in, and the Jews set forth on a forty-year expedition through the wilderness in search of the Promised Land.

They made it, but Moses died before they arrived.

I am Jewish but I'm not religious in any traditional sense. But that story speaks to me now, and I wonder whether this disaster, with so many sick and dying from an invisible microbe with remarkable ability to spread from person to person and no cure, will free the enslaved from bondage.

Will we wake up? And what does that mean? What do we have to do, to be released from the shackles of an ignorant society, a repressive government, a legacy of racial violence, and the rise of an extraordinary, modern Pharaoh in tight allegiance with the richest, most bigoted and self-centered class hell-bent, so it appears, to let the world fry?

I ask you. 

Yesterday, April 6, on KPFA's Letters and Politics, Mitch Jezerich interviewed Yanis Varoufakis, who served as Greece's Minister of Finance in 2015 and is Professor of Economics at the University of Athens. In the last two minutes he asked the Leftist economist what he sees happening after the pandemic. Said Vourafakis, "Humanity is approaching a fork in the road. It is totally up to us which of the two we will follow.

"One track takes us to a dystopia, to a situation where the money that has been pumped...into the economy is allowed to turbo charge even further the inequities in our world, putting more money in the hands of a few who just sit on it, or buy more houses and more private jets while the rest are dwelling in precarity, not knowing what is going on but unable to make ends meet and understanding that the future of their children will be worse than their own...the Donald Trump route if you will; and another track in which humanity wakes up to the fact that we are all in this together, and reorganize the international monetary system to stop climate change and take care of all the people."

If it's up to us -- is it? -- time ran out before he could tell us what to do.

Tomorrow I will give you my dystopian version of what lies ahead.