Double Hump

One of my confidants told me this weekend that she saw a family in masks walk past her house on the street. And she grew quite annoyed by their masks, until she was pierced by the desire to yell at them to take off their masks and breathe some fresh air!

I thought about this comment for a long time afterwards. It seemed that the comments revealed less about the choice of the family to wear mask and more about her desire for the pandemic to be over, or her frustration with the stay at home orders, or her own weariness of feeling protected to the point of trapped. I believe we are all getting weary of staying at home.

And it doesn't help that so many things don't work right now. If you wanted to be tested for covid-19, you probably couldn't be. If you need some protective equipment or toilet paper, you can't get it. If you thought you were going to get a relief payment from the federal government, you probably didn't. If you applied for a small business loan, you most likely heard nothing. If one of your family members was hospitalized, you may have very little idea of how they are doing. If you want to work, you maybe can't.

Words are meaningless if they are not backed up by action. There are lots of words from the federal government, but no actions.

My brother shrugs his shoulders and says to me over the phone, from thousands of miles away, "It is what it is."

No. I tell him. It is what we've let it become. Stop contributing to this self-fulfilling prophecy of helplessness.

I watched the protests unfold this weekend and I struggled with my own sense of frustration and helplessness. But the scary reality that we are all about to face in the US is how little we have done to really address this virus over the last month of staying at home. Sure, we stayed home. But it wasn't enough. We didn't really do that hard work over the course of the last month to get us out of this mess. That means: we didn't do enough testing, we didn't set up isolation health centers, we didn't figure out how to ramp up our in-country supply production/manufacturing, we didn't make enough plans to phase back into opening society safely, we didn't teach people (apparently) enough about the importance of masks. (And by the way, DOING that type of preparation provides jobs for people and helps the economy a lot more than throwing money at airlines, cruise ships and hotels.) But now, everybody is antsy and angry and the pathetic actions by the federal government have made the situation worse than necessary.

Here's what happened to the death rates in my hometown when we eased restrictions too soon, 101 years ago: