Matthew Gallaway
May 2, 2020

Azalea Season (Week Seven)

This week, the seventh in isolation, was marked by rain and wind. A bamboo fence we put up to keep the cats from escaping our walled garden blew over and we had to retie it into place. Not everything was so arduous. Or tedious. The red azalea we bought a few years ago was covered in blossoms: miraculously, spring had not been cancelled.

It was hard to know what was happening in the world. Or what was ‘really’ happening: was I wrong to think that we were still effectively in a kind of free fall, or was I being too pessimistic? Was it possible that we were through the worst of it — however you wanted to define ‘it’ — and that we just needed to soldier through a few more weeks? Both positions seemed plausible at different times of the day, depending on what I was reading. Or how frequent the sirens were. (In the seventh week, they still continued at a rate far higher than anything I remembered as normal.) In my heart, I felt that things were bad, and likely to get worse. But I wanted to be proved wrong. To scroll through Twitter is to understand that no figure is uncontested; everything has political implications. I read an interview with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in which she described how, in the early days of the pandemic, when it seemed like everyone was at risk, there was a whisper of cross-party solidarity on the Hill, a desire — even among some notoriously conservative Republicans — to give everyone enough money to weather the storm. But as soon the first wave unveiled the discrepancy in death rates between poor, urban, minority neighborhoods and the rest of the (less poor, whiter) country, a wall went up and it quickly became apparent that any funds for the urban poor would have to be wrung out of the federal government.

I listened to another podcast (Know Your Enemy) that described the kinds of measures we’re seeing now — essentially forcing ‘essential’ workers to risk their lives for starvation wages — as a ‘politics of elimination.’ It was disheartening to learn how the Republican (and neoliberal) response to the pandemic is only the latest in a series of similar measures, taken across pretty much every area (education, welfare, labor, housing, health, environment), designed to disenfranchise and marginalize the lower classes, always in the pursuit of economic efficiency or adapting to free-market principles, as if the value of such goals were self-evident. Fifty or sixty years ago, such ideas were associated with the Chicago School and specifically the economics and law departments — and the right-wing predecessors to the Koch brothers who funded associated think tanks — but now the association with the Chicago School seems antiquated, not because the ideas have dissipated, but because they are ‘part of the air we breathe.’

Being gay, I was reminded of how suffocating it had been to grow up in a straight world. Maybe I could understand our entire society as being somehow closeted, not in (or not only) in a sexual sense, but in the sense of living under one system that fills us with despair while understanding — unconsciously at first, until the idea of escape seeps into our thoughts — that there’s a better way, that we need to summon the courage to switch from one path to another. I know it’s not a perfect analogy, but it works for me. My hope is that people — or some significant portion of us — will not only become aware that the system in which we live is irrational and unhealthy, but also somehow understand that continuing is no only an option, that the only solution is to ‘come out’ — to unveil the nature of our desires — and to rearrange our lives according to a different and more humane set of rules and principles. This coming out will not be easy, however; we do not have educated, enlightened parents. We are the teenager whose parents will disown us and send us out to the streets before admitting that their view of the world is wrong, that their god is no better than ours. That, in fact, their god is worse.