One year ago today, the COVID-19 pandemic arrived as reality.

With New York City headed into lock down, and everyone panic buying toilet paper, I decided to head out to the grocery store. I stepped out of my house and the neighborhood was buzzing- lines out the door for restaurants, the outdoor patio at the bar next door full with Happy Hour Friday folks, the grocery store jammed, a huge mixed message of people stockpiling AND out and about and having a good time. Not a mask to be seen then because of the disastrous response of the government in preparing PPE for the pandemic. In fact, they had already started lying about masks in order to help secure enough masks for frontline workers, a lie whose impact would never be fully reversed.

And so, today, the second Friday in March, 2020, is the exact moment I FREAKED OUT, because it was clear I could not be safe in Park Slope. So, we packed up and headed to our small place on the shore the next day, where we stayed for six months. Jessica’s job wouldn’t re-start for six months, school went remote and we decided to stay remote, we had *just* postponed the Montclair Film Festival. Everything that was normal, stopped. Time moved on, sometimes grindingly slow, but sometimes, super fast, days piled upon days, but for all practical purposes, we are still living suspended in that moment, hanging between how we used to live and how we live now.

Soon, states were scrambling to compete with one another on the international market to get the resources they needed to fight the pandemic, because there was NO NATIONAL PLAN to stop it and, facing that devastating reality, the administration decided to pass the buck to the states and cities to manage the crisis– undermining their efforts every step of the way, confiscating PPE, outbidding states for ventilators, demanding political ass kissing in exchange for Federal support– while shamelessly denying reality and making everything much, much worse.

And so, in concert with the transformational horror of trying to figure out how to live with an invisible disease that was taking thousands of lives every day, the obvious, overwhelming trauma of the country was met with an unending stream of lies, lies intended to tamp down any dissent, any criticism, lies that defined a shamelessly criminal administration that had absolutely no plan, no response, a disdain for science, as psychopathic disregard for human life, and a relentless demand that the nation instead spend its time in fealty to bullshit. We didn’t get a chance to truly deal with what was happening to us – to properly acknowledge our reality- because we had to fight a war for the truth at the same time. That war culminated in a clownish attempt to overturn the seating of Joe Biden after his election, from lawsuits argued in the parking lot of a regional landscaping business to a mob storming an under-defended Capitol building to stop the certification of the vote. No consequences. For any of it.

Even today, one year later, the right would rather kiss the ass of a petty, tyrannical buffoon that address the massive damage they have caused. States throughout the nation are undertaking massive efforts to disenfranchise voters so that they can entrench right wing governance for a generation, and hey, I don’t know if you heard, but Texas is open to 100% capacity.

I wrote a while back about how the acknowledgement of our collective trauma MUST be the driving force in healing the country, but here we are, a 1.9 trillion relief bill barely passes without a single Republican vote. There is no one held to account. The Biden administration has turned the tide with the vaccine roll out, and yet, barely a nod toward accountability.

Here we are, one year later, likely still a few months away from some semblance of collective safety, and we remain voiceless, hoping for our collective health. We have barely had the chance to grieve, so many of us have held so much inside, gritting our teeth for one year, waiting for our collective reality to be properly acknowledged, for justice for this absolute fiasco. #OneYearAgo