Before COVID, I wasn't the government's biggest fan. I'd spent too much time on this great green earth, and far too many years talking and writing about politics, to not view government with a skeptical eye.
After COVID, the skepticism was gone. As was my trust in the institutions and agencies that so catastrophically bungled the pandemic response. My default setting now is that I'll be disappointed at some point, and I'll fight tooth and nail to make sure what happened during COVID never happens again.
I was one of the lucky ones. My dad was hospitalized during COVID with an unrelated infection. During breaks, I would go up to his room and visit him when no one else was allowed visitors. Ask me if I cared about the possible consequences.
When it was clear Dad wasn't doing well and declined further treatment, I made sure he was going to come home on hospice rather than spend his final days alone in that room. He came home with hospice April 2 and died on April 9; and I regret nothing about that week I spent taking care of him.
We were, in a dark way, one of the lucky ones.
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TV personality Janice Dean and her family were not. She, and her in-laws, lived in New York and Andrew Cuomo was governor. Cuomo -- who likes to tout his 'leadership' during COVID -- sent virus-infected seniors back to nursing homes, leading to the unnecessary deaths of thousands.
Including Dean's mother- and father-in-law, Mickey and Dee.
Watch her tribute to them.
If you got through that without getting teary-eyed, you're stronger than I am.
Five years on, the grief is better but -- sometimes -- the emotions just hit hard. I've talked about this several times on X, but after Dad died in April he was, like so many other Americans, denied a proper funeral. We were denied an opportunity to pay our last respects and the people who inflicted that additional pain on us just want to move on.
In Dean's case, the man who killed her in-laws dares to run for mayor of New York City.
People like Dean and me are part of a very large club: the club of people who never got to properly mourn our loved ones.
We were told that our grief didn't matter, that our loved one's lives were -- like many jobs -- 'non-essential' and that the priority was to 'stay home' and 'stay safe.'
There were seven of us at the viewing for Dad: my mother, my brother, my three sons, their father, and me.
At the cemetery, we were yelled at by some employee to stay ten feet away from one another, although he finally relented and let my boys -- who were 13, 10, and 6 at the time -- stand next to my mother. I stood next to dad's casket, alone, sobbing.
No one was allowed to hug me.
A few months later, George Floyd had multiple funerals. Three, to be exact: one in Minneapolis, one in Raeford, North Carolina, and one in Houston, Texas.
Five months before he died, Dad and I went on the Stars and Stripes Honor Flight to Washington D.C., where he and his fellow Vietnam Veterans (as well as Veterans from the Korean War and World War II) were treated like kings for a day, a long-delayed thank you for their service and sacrifice.
It was serendipitous that we made that flight, the last one for 2019 (and the last one for a while thanks to COVID).
In the years since, I have not forgotten, nor do I plan on forgiving.
What happened to far too many people was an egregious abuse of power, forced on us by politicians and public officials who often didn't abide by the rules themselves.
And then did away with the rules for certain political causes.
We owe it to our loved ones' memories, and to future generations, that we will never let what happened during COVID happen again.
We will not forget. Ever.
