Flowers: Five years ago, remembering a national nightmare

I had a slight fever, some chills, nausea and a killer sore throat.

I downed some chicken soup, heated up my water bottle and took a long nap. While I’m still under the weather, and look like “death warmed over” – one of my mother’s favorite phrases along with “go play in traffic” when she was annoyed with her kids — I’m not afraid of dying. I didn’t even reach for my Vick’s Vapo Rub.

It’s a cold, a garden variety medicate-with-gelato cold.

The irony is that five years ago this week, had I experienced the same symptoms, they would have rushed me to the quarantine unit.

In March 2020, we were just beginning our long national and international nightmare, something that none of us could have imagined outside of a science fiction film.

People dying around us, dozens and then hundreds and then thousands, because of a virus that no one understood and whose origins are to this day uncertain.

Family members forced to take their last breaths in isolation while grieving spouses, children and parents were trapped behind windows. My own boss was forced to watch his father’s funeral streamed on social media.

Churchgoers blocked from attending services, with the threat of arrest. The Orwellian tweaks to our language, with innocuous phrases such as “social distancing” and “masking” taking on sinister connotations.

That this was only five years ago now seems impossible, as if it happened in another century. I wonder if people remember what it was like to wait in line outside the grocery store since only two or three customers were allowed inside at any given time.

I wonder if they recall the eerie silence of the streets, and the suspicious-bordering-on-hostile looks that you’d get if you coughed in public.

I wonder if these people with faces I can see so clearly, have flashbacks about the mandatory masks, and the crazy folk who drove around in their cars with the windows up and their faces veiled.

I wonder if they remember the desperation of those who had pre-existing conditions such as diabetes, asthma and heart conditions, or those who were scheduled for cancer treatment and were forced to take a backseat to the men, women and children suffocating to death in emergency wards.

I wonder if they were related to, or were themselves, health care professionals who spent the better part of their days saving lives, and then not being able to come home and hug the people they loved the most.

And then I think of the vaccines, and that small pinpoint of light that glimmered at the end of the black tunnel, as we realized there might be a way to survive this pandemic. That pinpoint of light became brighter as the efficacy of the vaccines became more and more apparent, and we began to believe that we’d found the silver bullet.

That, of course, causes me to immediately reflect on the politicization of the salvation process, where conspiracy theories started seeping in and people began to wonder if the government was trying to control us through the mandates.

I still think the idea that kids needed to get vaccines and boosters and that they were barred from school if they didn’t was a vestige of Stalinism. But overall, we were in the middle of a war, and sometimes you can’t worry about civil rights under those circumstances. The ACLU types can take a seat.

Sometimes, the niceties of due process have to be suspended when you’re fighting for your life, in much the same way that Lincoln suspended habeas during the Civil War.

So, in retrospect, I forgive the people who closed the churches and made me wait in long lines and forced me to wear those ridiculous masks, even though the experts said they were useless. They were trying to survive.

I don’t forgive the people who went all Amish, shunning their friends who refused to get the vaccine, because they thought that the only time a person had the right to control their bodies was if they wanted to kill their babies.

I forgive the people who disinvited me to social events because I refused to wear a designer mask while trying to sip my Chablis.

I don’t forgive the people who lied, on both sides.

And as I take my Sudafed and sip my tea, I thank God that I survived, when so many are now in His arms.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at cflowers1961@gmail.com.