"America!"

It is April 30, 2021. COVID is raging in India. I am not from India or of Indian heritage. I am human. How can I not care? People around me say, "Oh, I can't read that." How can one not "read that?" The victims on the south Asian subcontinent are us. We are them. It is as simple as that. 

Today, I cancelled a lunch date. The weather was not conducive to sitting outside. I worried that my friend would think I am silly. But COVID is insidious and burrows into our bodies literally and figuratively, like a nasty tick. I will not eat inside a crowded, small restaurant/market. I am fearful of COVID, eventhough I received my two Phizer vaccinations. I wear my mask as a shield now. Incredibly lucky that these are my concerns; ridiculously trivial when one sees pictures of crowded cremation grounds--smoky, hot, and virus infested--and caskets piled up, in makeshift tents, to be buried at all hours, in Brazil and Peru. 

I am transported to India, last year to Queens, New York. Baby boomers, like me, not particularly unwell, frail, or old are destroyed by the claws of a virus that squeezes the air capacity out of the lungs. The human causalties are not street people or beggars, though the latter are tragically dying by the hundreds of thousands. The sick are mothers and fathers, wed in the 1970's, who led a typical life, working, playing, crying, and laughing. They are the Indian version of me, living retirement years. 

Who or what is the cause of these disasters? We are. Humans should not handle wild animals without protection, let alone eat them. Last year, the world was caught unawares. Though that is an insufficient reason for what came to pass. But in 2021? How can a country like India, with large pharmaceutical companies, neglect its own people? Money--probably. Always follow the money. I can imagine....And an increase in private health insurance in India which translates to money in someone's pocket. There but for the "grace of God" go we in the United States. If a certain insane, tyrant had won the election, we might have been India. The world would have said, "America."