The Year the World Tilted

Some weeks the past taps you on the shoulder, and other weeks it drags you straight down the Rabbit Hole — the deep, winding kind that only long‑time bloggers know. Jean’s been keeping this blog for over a decade, which became her archive and a time capsule that she didn’t realize she was curating. And every so often, an old post rises to the surface and reminds her of who she was, what the world was doing, and how much life has shifted since then. But the year the world tilted isn’t just about Jean’s experience, it was everyone's, too...AI

Sometimes I go through the Rabbit Hole of reading my past posts. This blog goes back to 2012, so that rabbit hole is pretty deep — and with my failing memory, I end up reading about a lot of things I’d forgotten. That happened this week when a post titled Going Rogue popped up in my sidebar. It was written in April of 2020 during the height of the global COVID‑19 pandemic, when there was a toilet paper shortage and non‑essential shopping was forbidden by law.

I ended up reading all my pandemic posts and was reminded of things like going to my first Zoom meeting — a funeral for a close relative — and my brother spending weeks on end in a COVID hospital miles away from his family, not that the miles mattered because visitors were not allowed. I wrote about the refrigerated 18‑wheelers parked outside hospitals to hold the bodies the funeral industry couldn’t keep up with. At least those people didn’t end up in mass graves the way they did during the Flu Epidemic of 1918. My grandmother was among them, along with an estimated one‑third of the globe’s population.

We all went through a lot of hardships in our nationwide effort to prevent the spread of COVID‑19. Even with all the mask‑wearing, social distancing, limited places we could go, and businesses that shut down, the accumulated deaths due to the virus are recorded at 1,219,487 nationwide. It was the third leading cause of death in 2020 and 2021 behind heart disease and cancer, according to AI. And it would have been worse if not for Dr. Fauci standing firm against Trump pushing back against the precautions we were mandated to take. Remember Trump suggesting we should “drink bleach to kill the virus?”

I still find it hard to believe that some people would trust a president with no background in healthcare over a man who headed the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for nearly 40 years. A man who saw us through HIV/AIDS, SARS, the Swine Flu, MERS, and Ebola. A man who served under six presidents as the government’s leading expert on infectious diseases. To this day, Dr. Fauci says if we had started “mitigation" earlier, more lives could have been saved. But MAGA Republicans are still trying to discredit him because paranoid Trump thought Fauci was working for the Democrats to make him look bad. He seemed to think if no one mentioned the pandemic, we wouldn’t notice people in our communities dying like flying insects on a bug zapper. It saddens me that the administration is still trying to punish a man who gave most of his life to public service.

I didn’t want to just rehash day‑old news, so I Googled the phrase “good things that came out of the pandemic” and found these:

1. Remote working from home, which allows more flexibility for working moms.

2. The expansion of telehealth opportunities.

3. Curbside grocery pickup and online ordering for home delivery.

4. Expanded use of Zoom for public hearings, business meetings, and court proceedings.

5. A surge of new businesses and entrepreneurship that created new jobs.

6. Rapid funding to accelerate vaccine technology and research across the globe.

7. And last but not least, the pandemic allowed many people to reconnect with hobbies and family time. For example, people took up baking bread in such large numbers that flour and yeast were in short supply. Pet adoptions soared, and YouTube channels were born to teach us all kinds of things and keep us entertained.

Revisiting those old pandemic posts may seem self‑indulgent, but doing so reminded me — and anyone who cares to go down that rabbit hole — how fragile “normal life” really is. Those posts and their reader comments give us a peek into the lives and thought processes of ordinary people adapting to changes during extraordinary times.

Little by little, life filled itself in again. We went back to restaurants, back to concerts, back to hugging people without thinking twice. We learned how to live with the memory of what happened without letting it swallow us whole. We discovered how resilient we are. But the pandemic, hopefully, also taught us that public health isn’t a one‑and‑done chapter. The recent measles outbreaks — a disease we once had nearly eliminated — proves that the debate over vaccines, science, and community responsibility is still very much alive. ©