It’s the second Tuesday of the month and the Shasta County Intermountain Patriots, a group involved in California’s state secessionist movement, are about to start their standing committee meeting.
It’s two in the morning for me in London, but just past the end of the working day for everyone else in Shasta County. I imagine them sitting in their respective kitchens fumbling with the Zoom meeting link, excited to socialize with their neighbors and friends, just as we all are during what seems to be the apocalypse.
I catch the very end of conversations about grandkids and new puppies. One by one, gruff voices give quick updates about their lives interspersed with inside jokes between one another and short chuckles.
Since COVID began, these conversations became more and more intimate as people grasped at each other, trying to hold what was taken away from all of us.
An off-hand comment about the mask mandate shifted the mood immediately and silence fell across the attendees. I anticipated an onslaught of angry comments on governance and freedom that never came.
One voice broke the silence, “I’m worried.” No one responded. They mourned.
...
The trauma that follows something like a fire, like a flood, like a pandemic, is all-encompassing. Where does one emotion end and the other begin?
The collective fear, anger, grief, so entirely morphs the flows of space in ways that cannot be ignored, but also can’t really be articulated.
We know Covid haunts some of us more than others - some watched loved ones suffocate to death, others have developed long-Covid, bodies given an unimaginable weight to carry, for others, time is slowly adding noise to memory.
What is remarkable, however, is that we all came face to face with something intangible, something you could not see, but you could feel - all of us, with the same thing, at relatively the same time.
It’s that moment when you sit with someone you can grieve with. You’ve both lost something, you both see each other in a way no one else can see you, even if they are sitting right next to you.
This collective fear, anger, grief, happens every fire season, every flood, every terrible disaster you can think about - but they are isolated enough to mean they can be ignored.
Consider the viscosities of space via unevenness in changes to the physical and emotional landscape.
These climatic events happen, and more increasingly happen, in rural areas. They are population underfunded, underserved, ignored, and viewed with contempt from urban centers of power.
Isolation exists past the physical, it is emotional, mental, intangible - again, all-encompassing.
Where does this anxiety go? Where does this anger go? What tangible thing can be used to take back power from a deeply existential danger?
...