A fortunate cartoonist emerges from quarantine with long-haul frustration

[babylonsister]

https://tucson.com/opinion/local/fitz-s-opinion-a-fortunate-cartoonist-emerges-from-quarantine-with/article_c5e962c8-7fad-11ec-b496-2718dc5c90d6.html

Fitz's Opinion: A fortunate cartoonist emerges from quarantine with long-haul frustration
David Fitzsimmons Jan 29, 2022
The following column is the opinion and analysis of the writer:

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Two of my children and a grandchild survived COVID. Close friends died from COVID. As vulnerable friends struggled with family members who refused to get vaccinated against COVID, I became infected with corrosive rage, fury for the fools contaminated with cognitive dissonance, the bellowing biohazards among us who upended any collective will to contain the lethal plague that repeatedly hit close to our hearth.

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During home quarantine I wondered about the self-imposed isolation that politicians enthusiastically embraced, where they remained cloistered far from the suffering they invited into our communities. They must have had friends like I did. Old and young friends? With every death I mourned for them knowing they must have experienced raw merciless terror as their lungs failed them and the quicksand of death swallowed them as they searched for familiar faces that were not there.

When my fevers came I recalled an earlier visit to a Walmart where I couldn’t help but glare at the unfit citizens who gleefully defied the store’s mask policy. I watched in horror as the accomplices of a lethal killer breezed past anxious masked seniors and despairing exhausted parents who steered their strollers in the opposite direction.

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As I recover, my faith in our institutions and our fellow citizens will never recover. Health care, school and social welfare systems are overrun, overwhelmed and abandoned. Our indifferent public-health-undermining, conspiracy-peddling politicians in Phoenix answer by plotting electoral thievery.

Back at my board I sketched the most tragic long-hauler I know, our democracy. I discarded it, relished the gift of a deep breath, looked out my window at the beautiful day and hesitated to venture out.