Together We Will Mend
Grief is in two parts. The first is loss. The second is the remaking of life.” ~ Anne Roiphe
A writer named Teodrose Fikremariam wrote this heartfelt piece about his experience over the past year dealing with loss and trauma. Fikremariam is the co-founder and editor of the Ghion Journal. Prior to launching the Ghion Journal, he was a political organizer who once wrote a speech idea in 2008 that was incorporated into Barack Obama’s South Carolina primary victory speech. He is originally from Ethiopia.
Teodrose begins with the story of being torn away from his birthland Ethiopia as a seven-year-old and arriving in America as a political refugee. He later loses his dad in 2001 to lung cancer, saw his mother struggle with depression for most of his life, and eventually losing everything when he became homeless for two years in 2015.
His piece is part therapy and a means of giving aid and comfort to others who are still trying to mend from the crucibles of the past 16 months.
Like many of us, when stories about a mysterious illness that had emerged in Wuhan, China started to trickle out at the latter end of 2019, he didn’t pay too much attention.
In an era where everything is treated as a national emergency and breaking news has become a business model for mainstream media as a means of drawing eyeballs, I mostly tuned out when the word Coronavirus started to appear in headlines. However, as account after account of a deadly virus wreaking havoc throughout Wuhan started to be pumped into our collective conscience, what started off with nonchalance morphed into a growing apprehension.
He writes about how the pandemic took a chomp out of the Big Apple. New York was once a city that never slept lulled more than 8 million people into a coma.
Every time I visited Queens prior to 2020, I was used to saying hello to strangers and striking up conversations with random people on sidewalks. Not so last year; all the sudden strangers became possible vectors of a disease that could snatch your life; neighbors were all a sudden transformed into pathogen carriers to avoid. I’m not resorting to hyperbole when I state that 2020 broke humanity’s collective spirit.
What I wrote about my experience last year is not unique to me; to the contrary, there are countless millions of people who underwent the same agonies of losing loved ones as their worlds were turned upside down by a virus that seemed to come out of nowhere. This is why I tell people to be empathetic and patient with each other instead of trying to score cheap points to advance personal beliefs even if I fail to live up to those standards at times. Though I have no plans on getting jabbed with experimental gene therapy cocktails, I understand how the shock and awe of last year have made people take steps that they would not have otherwise taken.
Fear is a powerful motivator; after all, I once looked to Fauci and Cuomo as saviors when I was cowering in fear in Queens last year. We are a people — as a nation and a global citizenry — who are dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder; what is needed more than ever is compassion instead of bashing one another while politicizing something as agonizing as this pandemic.
As much as I plead for forbearance towards our fellow humans, when it comes to the despicable people who intentionally drove us into this state of hysteria, compassion is the last thing that is on my mind. We now know, after Fauci’s emails were released last week, that Covid-19 was not a natural phenomenon but a manmade pathogen that was created either at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, at Fort Detrick here in the United States or most likely both. The same Fauci I saw as a saint was actually a devil who was funding gain of function research which paved the way for the emergence of Covid-19.
More than 650,000 Americans and 3.5 million plus people through the world died needlessly because mad scientists, bankrolled by factions within the US government, were playing God and creating a super virus. Given that a few months before the first case of Coronavirus was reported, a global exercise called “Event 201” outlined the steps to take “if” a Coronavirus emerged in which they stated that their end goal was a global “vaccination” campaign, it is evident that Covid-19 was planned in order to inject billions of people with mRNA and adenovirus boosters.
Though I will never get it through the courts or from acts of our government, what I want more than anything else is accountability and justice. It’s only because of my faith that I have not allowed my mom’s murder to drive me into a state of bitterness or to commit violent acts. There are many who think they can keep getting away with committing malfeasances with impunity, but where there is hubris, shortly thereafter comes the fall. Throughout human history, tyrants have been able to rule with iron fists until they commit an act of overreach. Aristocrats in France and Nicolae Ceausescu, to name a few instances, learned the hard way what happens when they go too far only to swing in the wind once people say enough!
Read the entire piece here: 2020 Revisited: the Year Coronavirus Broke Our Collective Hearts and Spirit, But Together We Will Mend
Clayton Craddock is a father, independent thinker, and the founder and publisher of the social and political commentary newsletter Think Things Through and host of the Think Things Through Podcast. He’s an alumnus of Howard University and is the drummer for the Broadway musical Ain’t Too Proud — The Life and Times Of The Temptations.
Other musicals include: “Tick, tick…BOOM!, Altar Boyz, Memphis The Musical, and Lady Day At Emerson’s Bar and Grill. Also, Clayton has worked on: Footloose, Motown, The Color Purple, Rent, Little Shop of Horrors, Spongebob Squarepants, The Musical, Evita, Cats, and Avenue Q.
Follow him on Instagram, Twitter or read more on his website: claytoncraddock.com
