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Epiphanies and Unpopular Opinions

In 1995, as I was curling my hair in my dorm mirror, I heard a fervor outside my room door. When I opened it, I found a dozen or more kids, some wrapped in towels, rejoicing in the hallway.
The verdict for the OJ trial had come down, and the jury had declared him innocent.
I was quiet and introspective about the pronouncement for a few reasons. One of them was that I had an odd dream, in which I was babysitting the Simpson children, when their father had quietly come to me to tell me he was innocent.
It was a crazy dream, and surely one born of stress and confusion, but made even more so with the unabashed celebration in his acquittal.
I often find myself on the wrong side of the popular opinion. I don't believe Carol Baskins killed her husband (for those who with the Tiger King). I don't think the Bachelor is good TV. I don't think Shakespeare was the genius he was hailed to be, and recently, I don't hate our quarantine.
I have been a mother now for twenty one years (plus the nine months needed for pregnancy). In that time, I have raced around to ballet, clarinet, violin, lacrosse, softball, T-Ball, baseball, gymnastic, horse back riding and piano lessons. I have headed PTAs, run for School board, run for political office, been on the board for a nonprofit, run a business, spoke at press conferences, volunteered in schools, worked for friends, chaired charitable events, and been a daughter, wife, sister and friend to so many people. And I have been tired.
We spend the majority of our lives chasing something- approval of others, or amending wrongs from our own childhoods, or fulfilling promises we made to ourselves, that we forget the simple things in our lives. The way it feels to pull a batch of perfect chocolate chip cookies from the oven, to write a journal entry, to lie in bed with our children and read them a passage from a quintessential childhood book. We forget what it was like to grow up in the 1970s or 80s, when our parents were too absorbed in the Cuban Missile Crisis/Acid Rain/ African Poverty/IRA conflicts to helicopter over us. The days when we were left to our own devices, deciphering Madonna lyrics, finding salamanders in our yards, making a world for our barbie dolls, reading our Encyclopedia Brown books, riding our bikes till the street lights came on, figuring out a pogo ball, listening to Casey Casum on Sundays, and lusting or emulating Molly Ringwald to focus on the rules and the world's woes.
I know what this disease has cost us. I watch the dead counts daily, I read the world statistics, I listen to the governor's daily updates. I am not naive, nor do I have rose colored glasses.
But speaking purely from a selfish point of view, from a small business owner with kids out of school, in the state hit hardest from the virus, I can think of worse scenarios.
Our world, in an environmental sense, has been begging for mercy for decades, Our rainforests are depleted, and our waterways are polluted and our wildlife have been uttering a collective What the Fuck for as long as we have been alive, but humans are selfish. We want what we want right now right here and forever. And I don't fault us. Why would we not want what the Kardashians have? Why would we not be recalcitrant to rules that prevent us from living our vision board lives? We have been told since we were toddlers that we can have anything we work for, and this trip, this house, this SUV, this life, it is what we worked for.
We color code our calendars, we prioritize our friends and families along with our children's sports and recitals, we renovate the Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs at will to make sure we are still popular and relevant and social media certified, and then BAM here comes a pandemic. An inconvenient fucking pandemic with its memes and its warnings and its rules and its goddamn risks and we are left bereft.
No more botox, no more Yankees, no more arena concerts or catholic ceremonies. No more haircuts, no more dinners out, no more pedicures. We are suddenly left to our own devices. We just make our own food and clean our own homes and cut our own nails and pump our own gas and take our own pictures and educate our own children and it SUCKS. It is inconvenient and unglamorous and doesn't provide us with enough content for our social media page and all that's left is sharing someone else's cute story or cute video or tribute to the health care workers and what is left for me in all of this?
And here is where it all changes. Maybe so much of this shit was extraneous. Maybe we should have been doing most of this all along. Maybe when our parents were considered neglectful back in the days of Rick Springfield and David Bowie, they were already knowing in advance that the very best thing they could do for us was to let us figure it our for ourselves. After all, they had lived through Vietnam and Woodstock and Nixon and Kennedy and MLK and Malcolm X telling them by any means necessary, and their liberal/conservative/neohippie/liberartarian/socialist brains were telling them not raise a bunch of pussies. And then we became a bunch of pussies.
We have been spending our lives fighting about everything under the sun. We fight on social media, we fight on mutual soil, we teach our children to fight on the sports fields, we come up with reasons to fight even when we agree.
So the world has come to a pause. A brief one, but a loud one. And it has asked us to stop fighting. To clean up our act. To stop being assholes, or snowflakes, or douche canoes, or whatever the internet tells us we are at this moment. This is our moment. Our moment to hold the button on the remote and figure out when to press play. We can press play when the president, the piece of shit human flesh ball of greed, tells us to. We can press play when the environment, the blissful suddenly clean water of Venice, tells us to. We can press play when our kids, the ones who are so confused and yet delighted at this crazy jolt to routine, tell us to. Or when we, ourselves, have figured it out enough to do it.
We are living in anti-vaxxer/ reality show/ Facebook/ entitled/ keyboard warrior/ pissed off at everyone/ artisanal beer/ farmers market/ crusts cut off/ memory foam kind of world. We have a million things at our fingertips and yet we hate everything. So this is our oppurtunity and we don't know when we will get it again.
Do we soak in what we are learning now, what we get to enjoy and relish, or do we push to get our entitlement back? Do we recognize what we have done, or do we shrug it off and wish for more? When the world reopens its doors, who do you want to be?

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