Most reported U.S. Omicron cases have hit the fully vaccinated -CDC The headline to the article quoted below from Reuter’s.

Everyone I know is really blue. We’ve run out of resilience. The world feels small and fragile. A Tweet by Susan Orlean @susanorlean Writer, writer, writer. Oh, I also write.

I was going to say that Michele and I are feeling a general malaise this new year, but it’s more like a low-grade panic, sort of an ongoing “Oh! Fuck, not another round of Covid. This can’t be happening, when IS it going to end?” We have spent the Holidays cloistered at home with not much to do except look at the Christmas tree and think about what 2022 is going to bring. I think it is going to be another interesting year¹, sort of like last year but with less Covid and an election. Although I’ll admit, my predictions are probably somewhat warped because my influences are mostly from what I am fed on the web and the various algorithms are filtering what I get.

Reading about the misnamed Spanish flu, however, has made me a little more sanguine about the pandemic. The 1918-19 flue just seemed to fade out, getting weaker and usually more contagious each time around. With the Omnicron variation, this seems to be what is happening with Covid. From the Covid’s point of view, a healthy host is much better than killing off the host quickly. Between people dying off, people getting Covid, recovering and becoming somewhat immunized, and people getting immunized by vaccine, the pool of Covid recipients should get smaller. We should go back to leading almost normal lives, free to wander around again (although we’ll probably be wearing masks inside for a while). That’s what we all hope, anyway.

The problem is that the world without Covid will not be normal, not by the standards of fifty years ago anyway. Now we have a large group of disgruntled citizens who say that Trump won the election and a smaller but very loud group who say they are willing to resort to violence to bring the country back to what they consider normal, and, obviously, that’s not normal, the violence part isn’t anyway. Now we have a climate that is not normal and getting further from normal every day. In both cases, we have a government that is split into two groups; one group that doesn’t think this abnormality is abnormal and the other group that does think it is abnormal but doesn’t seem capable of doing anything to tackle the problem.

Speaking of the climate not being normal, one thing – well, maybe two things – that are sort of crazy this year is that the orchids on our front porch started blooming in the middle of December and the leaves on many of our trees haven’t dropped yet. At first, I thought they hadn’t dropped because of no rain to knock them off, but we’ve had much more rain than normal and the leaves are still hanging on. I’ve started rooting for the leaves to hang on long enough to see what happens when the trees start to grow in another month. I’m only guessing on the month part. The acacias used to bloom in early February but that bloom date has been moving forward, last year, they were starting to bloom by mid-January.

It should be interesting to see how the country reacts to January 6th as the details continue to dribble out – often by Liz Chaney – my guess it will infuriate those of us who are already convinced January 6th was actually a failed insurrection try, a large portion of the populus will not pay much attention, the Trump diehards will remain Trump diehards, and the country will slide slightly to the left. I think that because in the ’60s and early ’70s, the violence was coming from the left and the negative reaction to that violence helped elect Ronald Reagan. People wanted Law and Order and saw the left as violent. Now the violence is coming from the right and I think people will react to that by moving slightly left (or to the Democrats even if many of them are not at all left).

What does worry me is that a lot of the people who participated in the failed insurrection, seem to be getting pretty cushy sentences. I remember a Tweet, I’m not sure by who, that said something along the lines of When an attempted insurrection goes unpunished, it is only a rehearsal.

I have a tendency to think in binary terms – most of us do, actually, that’s how the world is presented to us – either the Democrats win this November and we pass all kinds of much-needed legislation, or the Republicans win and ignore climate change while continuing to arm the populous – reality will be, probably, not either one. I don’t think that the body politic wants bi change, well, yeah, we all want the other guy to change but we don’t want to change our own lives. Not when it involves real sacrifice. There are too many self-interests – and I mean that in the worst as well as the best ways – too many antibodies built into the system to make change easy. Just as important, most media organizations have a vested interest in keeping the country agitated and divided so they fan the flames of those divisions.

We’ve had a lot of rain so far this year and I love it, but it also means a lot of grass and undergrowth which, if we have a dry, hot, summer which we probably will, will mean a lot of fires. Big fires. At least CalFire – California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection – thinks so, their budget will be almost three billion this year and they are hiring lots of people, everything from foresters to cooks. Speaking of hiring, I think there will be a labor shortage this summer and more pressure for companies to raise the pay for so-called low-skill jobs. That pay increase should ripple upwards somewhat.

In the ripple upward department, I think Chinese food is starting to go upscale and so will Mexican restaurants. Don’t get me wrong, we’ll still be able to get cheap Chinese and Mexican food, but, just like hamburgers and fried chicken, there will be more fine-dining Chinese and Mexican eateries. There will also be more high-end movie theaters, the kind with soft leather seats and available cocktails. And more electric cars and bigger TVs.

In the end, whatever the year does bring, we will be more outside to see and feel it. We’re getting used to Covid and adjusting so, even if this year is not anywhere near normal, either are we. Happy 2022.

1. I’ve read that there is a Chinese curse, “May you live in an interesting time.” that I find hard to believe, one thing you can’t change is the time you live in.