Don't Go Home For the Holidays

I wasn't going to post anything here this Thanksgiving holiday, apart from my Music Video Of the Week feature, but events have led me to launch this extemporaneous rant, which is addressed to the fifty million Americans who are traveling during the holiday in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Have you lost your minds?

 

Do you really need to see your parents, your siblings, nieces or nephews, Grandma Jane, Uncle Max, or Cousin Daryl for Thanksgiving?  Didn't you see them last year?  People, this year is different.  There's a virus out there that is as deadly as it is contagious - and it's so contagious you might get it from someone a mile away exhaling in a wind gust.  You're going to be in close quarters with asymptomatic plane and rail passengers in large metal boxes where everything has to be sanitized every five minutes.  You yourself may be asymptomatic.  Even if you take all of the precautions you can, you're still going to worsen the pandemic, not avoid it.  Don't you want to end this pandemic so next year we can travel without having to clean everything in sight or look like ninja warriors?  If you do, you'll stay the fuck where you are!  

"But Steve," you say, "isn't it just you and your mother at your household?  Who the hell are you to tell us we can't see our relatives?"  Well, here's who I am.  I'm someone who has been estranged from my distant relatives because they have their own lives and their own concerns, and I'm lucky I can barely keep in touch with the relatives I do have contact with through social media, and that includes the ones who live nearby.  I have cousins I haven't seen in decades and cousins-in-law I've never even met in person.  I've missed weddings that were too far out of my reach or too inconvenient because of my other responsibilities.  I've had to go out of the way to even briefly attend funerals that I only had so much time to be at.  I had a cousin whose christening I attended when I was thirteen and whom I played with when she was a little girl that I'd lost contact with, and I thought of her on her fortieth birthday - only to find out long after that she'd died of cancer three weeks earlier.  I'm barely able to keep anything resembling family ties even when there's no national public health emergency, so what to do you think it's like for me now?  My mother and I have long had only each other, and I for one am particularly jealous of those with larger families and those who still keep in such close contact with their cousins that they see or talk to them every week when there's no pandemic to worry about!  If you have relatives you still see on holidays, if you have a reason to see them when times are good, consider yourself fortunate.  You'll likely see them next year.  But you can't see them this year.  If you do, you'll be lucky if you don't get them or yourself  killed by COVID.  All right, maybe you have the most opportunities for family gatherings to lose if you stay home, but that's only because you have the most opportunities for family gatherings in the first place! 

And that's it.