I am getting married soon.
“Soon” is a relative term, but that’s all I have right now. Words like “later,” phrases like “down the road.” Perhaps a season, “spring” or “summer.” “Next winter” is unfathomable.
What people tend to think when you tell them you intend to get married during a pandemic is “compromise.” What compromises are you having to make? But for us, the compromise was minimal (we thought). A courthouse ceremony—ixnayed because courthouses are closed for who knows how long, and the idea of a virtual courthouse ceremony is, frankly, depressing. So, then, a friend-officiated ceremony? One witness. Surely that was within reach.
We figured we’d at least get our marriage license—good for three months, time enough to gather an officiant and a witness.
The pandemic means applying for the license online and then going to the one courthouse still nominally open to pick it up. You make an appointment online to do this. Well, before the post-holiday COVID surge, you did that.
The post-holiday COVID surge means even that one courthouse isn’t going to do in-person pick-ups. So, you have to make an appointment for an online… not-pick-up, because they will mail you the license after the appointment. I suppose this is just an ID-check, at this point.
Well, there weren’t any appointments for a few weeks. After days of randomly checking the websites, we got one for January 20. Confirmed! Finally, we were on our way. A lone bright spot in the midst of a completely botched vaccine rollout, news that 1 in 3 LA residents have been infected by the virus, and a frankly somewhat successful coup attempt given that the MAGA chuds attacking the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 managed to actually disrupt the governance of the country for a few hours.
I got a call a few days later from a lovely, apologetic woman working far past the close of business. Could we possibly move our appointment to another day? The court is trying to have the building empty on Jan. 20, in anticipation of… well. “Civil unrest.”
My future husband and I had talked a lot, in the early days of the pandemic, about living in a failed state. There was a half-joking undertone to these conversations, a sense that we were perhaps being a little hyperbolic. After all, you could still do things like go to the store, the DMV.
There’s no hyperbole anymore. The basic functions of the state, already on the fritz for over a decade (perhaps several decades) have been undeniably compromised. Even if the Biden administration’s vaccination plan is properly rolled out, there are doubts that we will be able to vaccinate enough people. The virus is mutating into ever-more contagious strains because people will not (because FREEDOM) or cannot (because the government won’t pay people to) stay home for the amount of time it would take to eradicate the infection. Tens of millions of Americans are, if not frothing insurrectionists themselves, at least somewhat sympathetic to the frothing insurrectionists.
We may have bought ourselves a few years with a Biden administration. But worse is coming, simply because we no longer have the infrastructure to stop it.