antivaxxers

Illustration by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Friday December 24, 2021 (Two articles follow when clicking on the date above)

The pandemic’s terrible twos — lingering tantrums plague us

A pandemic is a hard, peculiar shape to wrap your head around, to fit your life, thinking, lungs and feelings around, to take sides about.

I’ll get to polarization and side-taking, in a bit. It’s true, this pandemic is not a world war, not global famine, but it is something. It has a shape. An ink blot maybe? Many things to many people? The shape of things to come?

Not a shape perhaps but more like a sensation, like walking through spider webs. It feels bad, you weren’t expecting it and, I mean, brrr, it’s spider webs, but then nothing bad happens to YOU and you feel silly because … I mean, like, it’s spider webs; gossamer. Chances would be slim that you’d be walking into actual spiders and even if you were, chances would be slimmer that they’d be black widows. Landmines don’t come in gossamer, do they?

You might feel that way sometimes.