COVID’s tragic spotlight

A street performance brought to you by COVID.

COVID raised the curtain on center stage. You are an inadvertent member of the audience. Unless you have resisted the allure of returning to some semblance of life before this pandemic, you have secured a seat in the front row.

The streets of the city serve as the stage. The actors, despondent, costumes tattered, lonesome, their eyes averted, their soliloquies are silence. Behind the spotlight lurks our assumption. We have prisons, of course, tax-constructed and -supported. Obsequious, a presumed necessity in a civil society. In actuality, our prisons are a social service, and when you think about it you must realize it’s a form of socialism.

So, why don’t we, why can’t we construct and support sanctuaries to secure refuge for those whose lives have unraveled beyond a sense of hope? What would it take to lift them off the streets secured from vulnerability and desperation, to shelter, clothe and nourish, to infuse their lives with dignity, a vision of hope? COVID insists we witness this play, these street performances, the drama that appears to have no end. It is a shared reality we cannot ignore. The players are the inadvertent audience to the play we are performing. How does it end?

Vicki Hertz

Spokane