Almost two months of the nation fighting the coronavirus, we must ask the question: what are you (am I) doing to continue the struggle against this tiny microbe?
For us sitting here in our comfortable home, we are doing all the things our leaders insist we do. We socially distance ourselves from each other. No hard to do, trying to keep the six feet apart is a little hard without a cattle prod, but we do pretty well for in most circumstances. Not all do this for we have see, when on infrequent trips to the grocery store, frequent visits to my doctors’ offices and to the pharmacy the tendency to revert to the “herd syndrome”; we simply must interact with others. But family have been kind enough to stay away, especially from me, one who has three of the top five “underlying medical conditions” conducive to contracting the dreaded virus.
I seem to digress. What else do we do? Watch movies we have seen a couple of times before, but most of the time we cannot remember the person who committed the crime. Jane is working on her weekly blog post about the Sunday morning sermon, and since it is Saturday, Missy is upstairs resting and the dogs are just being normal canines. I am trying to come up with something new to say about the “quarantine”, but have a hard time getting past a minor writer’s block.
Others, though, are cooped up with “family” and may find that family is irritating. We get on each other’s nerves more than we realize. One wonders if any divorces will come of the coronavirus, perhaps some enterprising person will crunch the numbers nine months hence to see how many new babies come along.
Our nation will survive this pandemic. But will there be any lessons learned from it, lessons that will improve our understanding of our common humanity? Will there be any turning back toward God, as happened during World War 2 or just after the trauma of 911? Unfortunately, I fear not, for when the danger is past, people drift back to the former way of living.
Each of us will find our own way of coping with the situation we are in. But each of us will need to assess whether a crisis, not of our own making, will make us a better person or not. But never give in to our baser instincts, and if we don’t, we will look back on these weeks of isolation and deprivation, not with affection, but with the knowledge we did the best we could in hard times and came out better people.