Editor’s Note: This is by far the most accommodating National Emergency I have had occasion to embrace. Lifestyle is essentially unchanged, and I blush to say that it was not until week eight of being ‘confined to quarters’ that this unusual crisis started to become mildly irritating. There is change everywhere I can see, but events are still in flux. I am fascinated by how we will navigate this one. Marlow has been thinking about it.

– Vic

A little more on the changing terms of re-engagement.

I cannot start without saying I completely understand the impossible challenge state leaders in Michigan and other governors faced in March and April. You can’t sit in Lansing — an hour away from a city with a waitlist for burials and not want to act decisively. But she and the others will evolve again and again as they make decisions, recalibrate and change courses in different directions from their initial decisions to lockdown and open up. We must not lose sight of the original purpose and give them all some slack.

The mission, theirs and ours, was, is and will ever be about timing — push the infection rate down and out, so we didn’t crash the hospitals. We’ve succeeded here in Chatham County as daily new infections are bobbing along the zero to one or two a day down from 10-12 day numbers at the height.

But somehow we, at least much of the media, have become enamored with eliminating all the risk. To
me, that is not just an unreasonable goal but is a societal suicide pact.

America is a country where you can buy Big League Chew and an AR-15 in the same store. Where Old Country Buffet was born. Where it’s still physically possible to drink and drive & text and drive.

We as individuals and families must assess the risk of these given situations and decide if we/they want to enter it. Testing will make that more transparent. But until then, assume the risk is higher at least on the far margins if we socially distance ourselves
, wear masks, wash hands etc. We have agency as citizens, and this sh*t ain’t hard.

Oh, BTW, I find more than a bit ironic that professional and big time college football could be postponed for safety concerns.
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“That’s impossible,” some of us silently said to ourselves early on, if and when told we might recover from this plague. We all “knew” at our ages that once you get the plague your number’s up. Ten to one against us were the longshot numbers . . . better than a lottery ticket’s chances but still lousy.

There would be no doubt when the test said we had a case of plague. Sadly we probably wouldn’t survive to hear the announcement of our positive for the virus” test results.

Stats said so.
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Courage or is it cowardice that drives the interned decisions to escape from early stage plague lockdown situations, especially for those of limited means? Both require some great emotion.

What interests those of us who tried to escape was living and dying for what one loves and treasures.

The key to this is to purge the darkness in our hearts, since true facts were of little reassurance.

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In the blink of an eye, before even the first full week of April went by, money problems for the suddenly jobless became most urgent. Well before the $1200 per adult checks arrived, much energy was expended by local restaurant owners and operators on filling out forms, hunting round for funds, and lining up their hand-to-mouth employees before they had time to think of the blackness that surrounded them. They would not be abandoned. The doors may have closed but many owner-operators kept their staff payroll for as long as they had money to pay them and their overhead and see if they could do carry-out and delivery ops. Customers did their parts by leaving large tips at the register for carry out or delivery.

The growing complications of our workers everyday life, which might have become an overwhelming deadly affliction, proved to be the testing ground for their bosses. They stepped up.

Plague Inc. / Rebel Inc. on Twitter: “The COVID-19 Solidarity …

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Flashes of lucidity, the broken lights of memories from the tales of their fathers and grandfathers, and the growing, younger, keener sensibility lead to solidarity in purpose of labor and management unknown in my life.

Obviously all this meant giving up what was most personal in their lives. The communal is ascendant.

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