It's May. After the first April in recorded weather history in Boston when the temperature never made it to 65F, this first weekend of the third month of the Coronavirus shutdown in the US is beautiful in southern New England---warm, with summery cumulus drifting past my window and being reflected in the blue glass of the Hancock. Another siren in the distance.
In reality, we haven't even reached two months since the shutdown began in mid-March. Nearly 70,000 Americans have died. Though these tragedies are not widespread enough to stop a proportion of us from whining about the horrific inconvenience of having to practice social distancing to staunch the spread of the virus. This was the week when a subset of troglodytes showed up with assault weapons at the state capitol building in Michigan and threw a fit.
Everyone in Massachusetts is now supposed to wear a mask when venturing out. I'm using a pair of bandanas that I used to use for wiping sweat away while hiking in the mountains. Though I am not going out much. When I do and when I return, I wash my bandana in the bathroom sink with lots of hot, soapy water and then, after rinsing, hang my "mask" on the hook on the back of my bathroom door to dry.
I am truly one of the lucky members of society. I have work that I can do from home for which I get paid; thirty million of us don't have any work now, and our systems for getting these people money to live on is haphazard at best. We can take care of one another financially through this, but will we? Those who have to still work outside the house---all of the medical staff treating so many ill patients, the grocery store workers helping to keep us fed, etc.---are at risk in ways that the rest of us only vaguely and inadequately appreciate.
This was the week, too, when video was posted on social media of at least a hundred unmasked people crossing an intersection at a traffic light in Atlanta. Are these time travelers from 2015? Willful naïveté and, as many have commented, a culture of entitled selfishness are ugly characteristics of today's American society.
Many brilliant people are working to find treatments to mitigate the virus, including development of vaccines to prevent it. But, we are not there yet. Having already endured the economic calamity caused by responding to the virus, it seems a simple concept to grasp that we risk compounding the impact by pretending the danger has passed.
And, yet here we are, in various states, like Texas, as an example, where unmasked, overweight customers are photographed at a table ordering food from a waitperson with only a paper mask on for protection. That more people will die because some people insist that they have a right to go eat a slab of ribs at a restaurant is surreal, embarrassing, unconscionable.
I've always been amazed by people who suffer some sudden, catastrophic injury---say quadriplegia from an auto accident---or being struck down by a debilitating illness---perhaps Parkinson's. Their lives are never the same afterwards. I have often thought that the mental torment of remembering how life used to be must be especially hard to manage. And, yet, these people have no choice. They adapt and move forward. We are all those people now in a sense. Our lives before Covid-19 are gone. But, if we're lucky enough to stay healthy, the adjustment to our post-Covid-19 lives, while challenging, is imminently manageable. Stay home whenever you can, wear a mask when you go out, and accept the reality of needing to adapt.
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