This Decade of Betrayals

In January 2020, I was snowed in at the home/studio situated at 8,000 ft elevation in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, completely isolated and utterly blind to crazed machinations of the nation as the convicted felon now in the White House began playing with shit in earnest by slinging it wildly in every direction possible, desperately hoping some of it would stick somewhere as nature fought back. I didn’t know it at the time, but I had contracted SARS-CoV-2. I caught it via handshake at the propane station from a Colorado Springs man, an individual who had been infected amidst the unmonitored mass ingress of travelers fleeing the raging, locked-down epicenter of Wuhan, China. But back then, the convicted felon now sitting in the Oval Office chose to keep the American public blind, defenseless, and completely in the dark.

My initial response to the illness was pure, terrifying befuddlement. It started with an odd, unexplained abdominal muscle aching. Because I was snowed in and performing no strenuous work, I knew it couldn’t be from physical exertion. Marooned in the high-altitude wilderness, my mind raced toward a grim conclusion: I assumed I had contracted Hantavirus, a notorious and highly lethal threat in the rural West, and that I was going to die alone there.

Two weeks later, during what should have been recovery, the virus traded terror for surreal confusion. A bizarre new symptom began: unexpected, unpredictable, sharp shooting pain sensations zipping through random parts of my body. It wasn't agonizing, but it was so utterly erratic that it made me laugh out loud in sheer bewilderment at where the next sting would strike. It felt like my own nervous system was misfiring at random. This was followed by a crushing wave of long-term weakness, profound lethargy, and a heavy cognitive degradation. My thinking became muddled and completely unreliable. I was a victim of an unknown ghost, trying to map out a phantom sickness with zero information.

Over the years since, that innocent, isolated confusion has congealed into a cold, sharp outrage.

With time came the public records, the intelligence briefs, and the taped admissions. I eventually learned that while I was shivering in a mountain cabin wondering if a rodent virus was killing me, the convicted felon in the White House already knew the truth. By early February, it fully understood the virus was airborne, highly transmissible, and five times more lethal than the flu. Yet, publicly, the malformed beast looked into the cameras and told us it was "totally under control." This wasn’t just a failure of bureaucracy; it was an obscene, self-serving act of negligence. By withholding vital public health knowledge to protect his own political numbers, he stripped me of my right to protect myself.

The true, stomach-churning cruelty of being left blind manifested shortly after, when a family crisis struck. My octogenarian mother suffered a catastrophic fall, breaking her hip. She required immediate surgery and a grueling stint in a rehabilitation facility—all during the volatile, mysterious initial stages of the domestic outbreak of SARS-CoV-2.

When my parents called me, desperate for help to navigate this sudden medical emergency, I did what any son or daughter would do: I rushed to their side. Because of a vile calculated silence, I entered the fragile world of my elderly, vulnerable parents entirely unaware that the lingering muddle in my brain was a highly contagious global pathogen.

The malformed beast's decision to delay and hide the truth weaponized regular citizens against those they loved most. Without public warnings, testing, or guidance, I was left in a position where I could have unwittingly infected my own elderly parents at the moment they were most vulnerable. My mother was fighting to recover from major surgery in a rehab center, and I was walking into her world, blindfolded by my own government.

This is the permanent record of that response. It wasn’t a victimless political game. It was a direct, reckless endangerment that turned a terrifying personal health crisis into a high-stakes gamble with the lives of my parents—all because our leader was too cowardly to tell us what he knew. It felt like attempted murder to me.

This was not a mere policy failure; it was a profound violation of the fundamental compact between a government and its people. By intentionally withholding the truth while a deadly pathogen infiltrated my life and my home, the convicted felon in the White House stripped me of my agency, endangered my family, and left me defenseless in the dark. For these reasons, I will always consider his calculated negligence to be a direct, unprovoked attack against my life, my liberty, and my pursuit of happiness.

Epilogue: Choosing the Sun over the Noise

In the years following that winter of isolation and survival, the physical and emotional aftershocks of the virus lingered far longer than the initial infection. Long COVID left behind a slow, grinding fatigue and a cognitive fog that frequently demanded my patience. Yet, if there is a single reason I am still here—still moving forward and still functional—it is a stubborn, refusal to let that darkness dictate my future. My general optimistic attitude is the only thing that kept me going through the worst of the ordeal, and it remains the anchor that keeps me steady today.

Survival, I’ve learned, requires deciding where to look. While the convicted felon in the White House continues to sling utter bullshit in every direction at every opportunity, dominating news cycles with a relentless barrage of noise and self-interest, I have chosen a different focus. Engaging with that ongoing theater achieves nothing but the destruction of one's own peace. Instead, I make the conscious choice to disregard all veracity and validity of the political spectacle entirely.

Keeping on the sunny side of life isn’t about denying the reality of what happened at 8,000 feet, nor is it about letting go of the profound outrage over a leadership that betrayed its people. It is about a refusal to let that outrage consume the present. My optimism is a deliberate strategy to reclaim the life, liberty, and happiness that were previously placed in jeopardy. The world will always contain individuals who trade in noise, deception, and chaos—but the peace at the end of the storm belongs entirely to those who choose to survive it.