Tom Fulks: After a year-long pandemic, can SLO ever go back to the way it was?

I hadn’t seen a red-tail hawk above Black Hill since before the darkest days of December compounded my festering pandemic malaise.

But there they were, two hawks hunting above the hill and the bay in the late-afternoon remains of the day. One hovered in a brisk onshore updraft, spotting prey; the other circled below, plotting a kill. A return of the hawks was auspicious, and the looming spring equinox portended longer days and, perhaps, better times.

Running the trail down the hill, I imagined a return to our pre-plague lives and values, to the days before San Luis Obispo County issued its “temporary” shelter-at-home order: March 21, 2020.

In the past year, I’ve learned about myself, my tribe, my community, my country, my place in the real and ethereal worlds. My faith in American humanity is battered, but intact. Still, my long-held conceit that SLO County people are special — fed by the lies we tell ourselves — is gone.

My illusion that our “specialness” held us above ignorance, intolerance, bigotry, racism and hatred has dissolved. The letdown began slowly, early on, accelerating during the summer of street protests — when militarized police put down peaceful demonstrators with teargas and foam bullets.

When downtown SLO businesses boarded up storefronts in a panicked response to public statements from freaked-out city bureaucrats.

When once-respected prominent citizens became scofflaws and spilled their true feelings into social media and the courts.

My tolerance for willful ignorance proved misguided when the simple acts of distancing and wearing masks turned into militant political theater. There’s a meme floating around the internet of a T-shirt reading: “When this virus is over, I still want some of you to stay away from me.”

The thought brought a smile as I descended into the musky forest of Morro Bay State Park, the soft quiet of the sand and scrub interrupted by birdsong and wind whipping through the canopy of eucalyptus, oak and cypress.

I know people a bit better now. I’ll keep a distance from some, even after we’re sufficiently vaccinated. They flew their colors. I won’t soon forget. Trying to think ahead, post pandemic, I wanted to make plans, to be hopeful, something I hadn’t allowed myself for a long time.

But first I needed to take stock of what we’ve been through. I’d written much of it down, chronicling daily the first five months or so on Facebook. Beyond that, I journaled on, but less and less frequently as the plague ran the clock and the misery mounted. In the beginning, I hoped the shutdown might unite us in common purpose and resistance, anticipating we’d respond as in past American struggles, like how we rallied to defeat evil during World War II.

Instead, on Day 4, Sheriff Ian Parkinson declared gun stores “essential” to the fight against COVID, marking the first of many brazenly political stunts overruling common sense and science as public policy.On Day 5, SLO County’s administrator, Wade Horton, declared: “If a business refuses to comply with the county’s Shelter at Home Order, it may face a misdemeanor punishable by a fine of up to $1,000, or up to six months in jail, or both.”

But not a single business was ever cited or fined by the county — a political, not health-based decision — proof that “unity” in the face of adversity was never to be.

Running through a tree tunnel into an open stretch, I ruminated: We were sentenced to division from the start. Our “conservative” majority on the county Board of Supervisors saw to that.

They never instituted a countywide facemask mandate, as done in Santa Barbara and Monterey counties, never asked the sheriff or district attorney to enforce Horton’s toothless decree, never even took a violator to civil court. They never enforced the state’s leisure-travel ban, never closed the beaches. They welcomed in the maskless, visiting hordes.

They put a bullseye on our county, creating a deadly nuisance attracting scores of tourists from COVID hotspots around California, triggering infection spikes after major holidays. Our political leadership in SLO County is no better than the governors of Texas, Mississippi and that QAnon bunch, I mused near the 60-minute mark of the run.

They didn’t do anything for us — just to us. But then, they really don’t know how to lead, much less govern. We deserve better.

As I rounded a bend and hit the pavement toward the marina, I spotted the red-tail hawks again. And I thought: We’re going to be OK, though we’ll never be the same.

Tribune columnist Tom Fulks serves on the San Luis Obispo County Democratic Central Committee.