Day 129…
OMG, we went to a museum.
We are with some friends up in Rockland County. We drove up yesterday. They have been in isolation since this began, but have started cautiously seeing people in recent days. We have had zoom conversations with them, but this was our first in-person meeting in over four months.
New York City is going to go into Phase 4 of reopening on Monday but with some modifications. Our museums will remain closed and there still will be no indoor dining allowed. As I have said, they have announced that the Empire State Building is going to open on Monday, but I wonder if that is still the case now that the Governor has scaled some of it back. I am guessing that they aren’t going to be able to do that.
The Governor also reiterated warnings about a possible second wave of the virus. With cases spiking in other areas of the country it seems all but inevitable that they will travel back to us. We broke our own record yesterday as a country with over 77,000 NEW cases reported.
That number is as if the entire city of New Rochelle, NY became infected in one day. Or Napa in California. Or Daytona Beach and Ormond by the Sea, together, in Florida.
Death rates are rising as well. 900 people died due to complications linked to the COVID-19 virus yesterday. Refrigerated trucks acting as temporary morgues are being brought into areas of Texas and Arizona to handle the overflow.
Ken Davis, the chief medical officer for Christus Health South Texas said yesterday, “There are only so many places to put bodies of the loved ones in. We’re out of space, our funeral homes are out of space and we need those beds. So, when someone dies, we need to quickly turn that bed over.”
We’re sorry, but late checkout is not available at this time.
We had the morgue trucks in New York City. We needed the trucks when we were completely shut down and everyone was staying home. It took several weeks after we initiated those measures before we started to see our case numbers start to decline.
They are ordering refrigerated trucks Texas and Arizona while the good people of those states are still out and about, still happily spreading the virus to each other. The Governors of those states are doing next to nothing to halt the spread. The only logical conclusion to draw from that, based on simple common sense, is that those places are going to see their numbers rise even higher.
Left unchecked like this, the number of cases can only rise. The number of deaths can only rise.
We’re sorry, but we do not have any available rooms this evening. Might we suggest you drive to another state?
Here in Rockland County, they have been operating under Phase 4 restrictions for about a week and a half. Indoor dining, limited to 50% capacity, is now allowed.
People, however, do not really seem all that willing to do it. We had drinks last night at a place with a large deck overlooking the Hudson River. The tables were well apart from each other. We had to wear masks while entering but once we were served, we could take them off. People were sitting outside but it didn’t look like anybody was eating inside.
The same rules that we have in the city are enforced up here as well. You cannot just order drinks you have to order food as well. This keeps people from showing up and hanging in groups together around the bar.
The owners were vigilant. They and their servers kept their masks on the entire time we were there.
None of those measures are a guarantee that the virus won’t be able to spread. Not by a longshot. There is still far too much that we don’t know about how this virus operates.
Three or four months ago, what we were all worried about was picking the virus up from a surface. We were all frantically cloroxing everything that we came into contact with - groceries, food deliveries, our mail. Recent studies now suggest that the risk of contracting the virus from something like that is actually rather low.
The risk of contracting it from the air is much higher. Aerosol transmission is a much more likely means of transmission that we originally thought. Gathering together indoors where the same air circulates poses a much higher risk, so the current thinking goes, than remaining outdoors where breezes can dissipate the droplets from our mouths and noses.
Time is also a factor. You seem to be far less likely to get the virus from somebody who is infected walking past you on the street than you would sitting near somebody in an enclosed space for an hour eating a meal.
That’s what the general consensus among health practitioners seems to be now. But there are no absolutes and no guarantees. We all have to put on our big-person pants and assess each individual risk ourselves.
The four of us drove over to the Stony Point Battlefield to take a walk. We left the windows of the car open so that the air would circulate freely.
A small family of people were leaving just as we arrived, which gave us the whole place basically to ourselves. We wandered around the site and looked out at the amazing views of the Hudson from some of the lookouts.
A small sandwich board outside the building that houses the museum announced that it was open. Four people at a time could enter wearing masks. We were thrilled.
We were four people and all of us had masks.
241 years ago, just one day passed the actual date, the Battle of Stony Point was fought. It was an important victory for General Washington and the Continental Army.
The British, who were headquartered in New York City had been trying to draw out Washington and his forces into a big decisive battle so that they could engage with them all at once. Were that to happen, the British were sure to be victorious if for no other reason than they had more men who were better trained. Washington did not give them that opportunity.
To maintain the element of surprise, the men under the command of General “Mad Anthony Wayne” were instructed to keep their muskets unloaded. In the dead of night, Wayne led his force up the hill to the fortifications and overwhelmed the British using bayonets rather than bullets. The whole thing was over in 30 minutes.
Later in the war, Stony Point was used by the Continental forces as a key point to cross the Hudson. It was more of a victory in terms of morale, however, than it was in terms of actual gains. But that triumph did much to bolster the resolve of the people fighting for their right to self-determination.
U.S. Representative from the state of Georgia, John Robert Lewis, passed away yesterday. He was the last living person to have spoken at the rally at the Lincoln Memorial where the Reverend Martin Luther King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech.
Congressman Lewis almost didn’t deliver his speech that day. Many, including Dr. King, himself, thought that it was too inflammatory.
Patrick O’Boyle, the Archbishop of Washington D.C. who was scheduled to deliver the opening invocation objected to Lewis’s line saying that patience was “a dirty and nasty word.” Patience is an important part of the Catholic church’s teachings. Lewis agreed to remove it.
Senator Robert Kennedy had gotten advance word of the speech and he was concerned as was NAACP leader Roy Wilkins. Lewis modified his speech.
He was originally going to object to President John Kennedy’s proposed Civil Rights bill saying that it didn’t go far enough towards offering any real protection to people against police brutality. Instead, he said, “It is true that we support the Administration’s civil rights bill. We support it with great reservations, however.”
Instead of saying, “we are now involved in a serious revolution” which the others felt would incite violence, Lewis, instead, said, “we are now involved in a serious social revolution.”
His original closing remarks were, “The time will come when we will not confine our marching to Washington. We will march through the South, through the heart of Dixie, the way Sherman did. We shall pursue our own scorched earth policy and burn Jim Crow to the ground - nonviolently.”
What he finished his speech with that day were the words, “We will march through the South. But we will march with the spirit of love and with the spirit of dignity that we have shown here today.”
Congressman Lewis devoted his entire life to the fight for social justice. His speech that day at the Lincoln Memorial began with, “We march today for jobs and freedom, but we have nothing to be proud of for hundreds and thousands of our brothers are not here, for they are receiving starvation wages or no wages at all.” We are still marching for that today.
Our country was born amidst a fight for social justice and freedom.
The principals that General George Washington and the rest of the Founding Fathers fought for may not have included everyone in the colonies at the time, but what they fought for, and won, provided the groundwork upon which broader freedoms could be added. And we have tried to do that ever since.
U.S. Representative from the state of Georgia, John Robert Lewis, was a great man. In him is exemplified everything that we stand for as a country. His pursuit of freedom and justice was heroic.
We should look, hard, at the people we have chosen to lead us at this point in our nation’s life. Are they living up to the ideals that we have been fighting for over the past 244 years?
Are they even close?
We have a moral obligation to build upon the groundwork that so many of our forebearers gave their lives to construct. If our leaders are not doing that, then we need to replace them.
Thank you, Congressman Lewis, for everything that you’ve built over the course of your life.
Our nation, Sir, will remain forever indebted to you.
RIP.
I went to the beach...
Love is the revolution
💕