The bandaid has been ripped off

This pandemic is like a person ripping off a bandaid from a wound that is not healed.

The pandemic has exposed a variety of harsh realities for so many people. The harshest reality being that we are not in control. This has been really difficult for many folks to grapple with and take in. We are surrounded by a society that has told us that we are special, that we are extraordinary, and that everything should cater to our desires. Our marketing is focused on our individual wants and desires (some that we didn’t know we had until a company told us that we needed/wanted something). Our entertainment is targeted to our individual wants. Services provided are based on our individual wants and desires. And we have been making our working environments about our individual wants and desires too. And of course religion has been a part of this mix. In the last century, there was a shift in much of American Christianity towards the personal savior and the individualism of faith.

Move forward to the present. We witness fights over masks and vaccinations. There are acts of rage in public events and meetings. There are debates over what is true. And the core of these messages are the same — who is in control? As with most things, there isn’t a nice easy answer, but rather a blurry mess of a spectrum of answers all jumbled together — which feeds very nicely into the narrative that so many of us have been fed for our entire lives. The narrative tells us that we are in control. Reality tells us a different story.