A moment of surreal

I was heating up a pot of water on the stove, something I normally would use a keurig for in order to make tea, and listening to dad watching “The Price is Right”.

I had just cleaned up a dozen eggs to sell to someone local who was desperate for eggs during quarantine and doing a load of dishes from the homemade dish soap. I even washed the ziplock backs to reuse, something I have not done since I was a kid.

I could feel the intensity of the surrealness I was experiencing right then. How my family was moving back to a more sustainable lifestyle during ma pretty technologically advanced time in our existence that was suddenly dropped to a halt by this unseen force.

Is this a book? It should be a book.

I own a digital marketing agency and create websites and regularly dive into code and social marketing analytics on a daily basis, yet I sit here making as much as I can from scratch, reusing whatever I can, acknowledging that everything in this moment is sacred. Even that insignificant ziplock bag.

And yet here I am, still coding websites, dad is still watching his soap operas, the dog is barking at everything like normal, but nothing feels normal. Everything feels different even though many things are still the same.

I think it’s mostly our emotional states and the uncertainty of the future that is really making things weird. I have a grocery pickup this week because I’m afraid of going into the store. I am planting so many extra plants this year because I don’t want my neighbors to starve and I want to have many seeds to save. I’m looking up the cost of ammo and doing an inventory of things we have because outside my windows is a different world than it was 3 months ago, and none of us were prepared for it.

Maybe some were. The preppers are pretty well off right now, and good on them for preparing for this.

In 50 years people will be reading our blogs, news articles, journals and letters and judging us and learning from us based on the decisions we make right now. I hope that the next generations can learn from us and what we are doing and have failed to do.

One thing I want to make sure we all know now so that future generations will also know is that the world is never going to be a safe place. Yes, I know we should all be kind and strive for a better world, I’m not arguing that.

But there will always be evil. There will always be those that want to take what you have, whether it’s your food or your innocence.

You can’t ever change that, not ever. And you will never know who is capable of atrocities, not ever. Someone is always the first.

I argue with the people who say we need to shelter our younger generations from things like the history of the Holocaust and things that are scary and show what humans are capable of. I argue that children shouldn’t know how to safely handle firearms at the right age, or how to hunt or do the very basics of adult functionality. I want our kids to know so they are prepared. I don’t want them to be a schmuck when the next pandemic hits or if someone tries to rob them, or worse. I don’t want them to be the ones that hoard toilet paper. I want them to know what to do, and I think we’d be doing a great disservice to our next generations if we rob them of the opportunity to understand how the world really works and prepare them how to handle it.

Sarah Connor style.