LogFAQs > #948323443

The personal anguish is real even if you don't consider the pandemic a problem for society at large.

My father was admitted to the hospital Friday due to COVID. He had been sick about a week before that. Over weekend, he trended better but we find out today he's going to the ICU and needs a ventilator. The impression is he is at a 50/50 chance for it to work.

The human cost is real. My family is very small. I only have one sibling and two first cousins. My brother has a four year old niece and she might not get to enjoy having her grandfather. My brother's family is only 2 blocks from my parents. They would get so much time together in the future. I'm sprialing into a borderline depression. I'm burning vacation hours from work because I can't focus. I can't travel home and take care of my mom due to her quarantine nor can I physically give her any sort of support -- nor can I get that sort of comfort either due to social distancing. I can't visit him in the hospital either for the same reasons. I've lived through other family members dying and how much it meant to be close to them during the process. Even if my father lives, being denied that outlet is hurting me.

The economic cost of this is real. My father is a small business man. His primary business is 4th generation in the family. He is the last in the family to have the licenses and training to run it even though he's business partners with his brother. If he dies, the business shuts down and we'll be forced to quickly find a buyer. My mother, a recovering cancer patient, will be in the middle of all of it (if she doesn't catch COVID and die).

You might not think intimate level family suffering matters on the societal scale. It might not on its own. Cumulatively though, it most certainly does. It might not ever touch you or yours, but it still touches the society and communities you exist within, thereby, it does touch you. The worst part is how so much of this feels preventable. The callous disregard for common sense care for the community and its members nationwide makes me question why we even have one. If society does not exist for the collective care and well being of its members, what's the point of having it? We should just break the social contracts and go back to Hobbes' state of nature and declare war of all against all.

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You know how fads are. Today it's brains, tomorrow, pierced tongues. Then the next day, pierced brains.
-Jane Lane