It's Been A Year

Posting on this blog on March 13 last year, I wrote:

I'm pretty well stocked on food and groceries, but I still need kitty litter and cat food in case we get locked down by the authorities.  I thought I'd be smart this morning and hit the supermarket early to avoid the crowds stocking up for the weekend.  I was wrong - at 10:30, the parking lot was near capacity and the store was packed.  The entire toilet paper aisle was completely empty, there was no ground beef or other meat in the coolers, the soap and disinfectant shelves were pretty thoroughly picked through, and there was no more water.  

Even worse, everyone was in panic mode, rudely cutting each other off along the aisles as if they were on a Black Friday shopping spree and this was the last Walmart on earth.  

I also noted that the so-called "president" gave  a speech about the coronavirus earlier that week, and the stock market responded with the biggest collapse since the crash of 1987.  He was scheduled to speak again later that  afternoon, and I shuddered to think what might come in the aftermath of a address on a Friday the 13th.

"This will all be over in a few weeks and we’ll come out of this a better, stronger country, I believe," I optimistically declared a few days later. "That which does not kill you makes you stronger, etc., plus as a nation I think a little adversity will do us good. Remind us of our own mortality, so that we can appreciate life a little more while we still have it." Poor, naïve thing that I was.  

Our new president is saying that with a little cooperation from the public, life could finally return to normal or something like normal by July 4, 2021, some 16 months after it had all begun.  Let's hope that prediction ages better than my March 2020 "a few more weeks" forecast did.