Post 43 - April 23, 2020
Day 43…
This morning, I am up early for no good reason.
It’s not like I have a problem from work on my mind.
Nothing has changed from yesterday.
It’s just all sort of relentlessly the same.
Yesterday I took a walk.
I’ve been taking a walk of several miles about every third day. Usually I head downtown because that’s where work was. Walking down used to be a normal part of my day when I was in town.
I can get down to Times Square and back in about two hours. It’s about three miles down and 3 miles back.
In New York, 20 city blocks, is basically the equivalent of a mile.
Having timed it, I can tell you that it takes 1 minute on average to walk the length of an uptown/downtown block.
I’ve never really figured out how long it takes to walk an east/west block, but they are longer.
Walking in New York is easy because it is basically a grid. There are some exceptions. Broadway, for example, takes some weird diagonals as it moves north and south. When you get downtown to the older section of New York all bets are off and you just have to wander.
Yesterday, I decided to walk north.
I don’t usually ever have a reason to head that way, but I thought I would explore.
While we are all going through the coronavirus pandemic, it’s important to remember that we are not all experiencing it in remotely the same way.
At no time in recent history has the social and economic divide been more apparent.
Some of us are staying home.
Some people are still going out every morning to their jobs except, now, when they do that, they are actively putting themselves in harm’s way.
As one of the people staying home, I can’t pretend to know what that is like to go to work these days.
I can only tell you what I can see.
Michael does a big weekly grocery shop at Trader Joe’s which is only about 4 blocks away from our apartment. When we need things at other times, we go to the neighborhood bodegas. Only a limited number of people are now allowed inside most stores at one time.
What Michael and I started doing this week is that he will do the shopping and then I will meet him afterwards to help carry the bags home to help lessen the amount of people in the store.
He has had to wait online outside for up to an hour and a half to get in.
Because every day is basically the same now, there’s no day of the week that’s any better to shop on than any other. The concept of the weekend has become a thing of the past. The only thing that seems to have an effect on people’s behavior is the weather.
When the weather is good, the line tends to be longer.
Most people in our neighborhood are now wearing masks.
It’s actually an official guideline now in New York.
You have to wear a mask whenever you come into proximity with other people or risk being fined.
Despite that, there are still people who don’t.
People with masks are starting to yell at those who aren’t wearing them the same way we New Yorkers yell at cars and bicycle riders.
I know for myself, when I am walking down the street, that I now give mask-less people a far wider berth as I pass them.
Every store that is open has markings on the floor - six feet apart - where customers need to stand to maintain social distancing. It is the same at grocery stores, post offices, wine stores, delis, hardware stores - you name it.
Many stores have markings outside, too, for the people lining up.
Helpful, but it’s almost not going to be necessary soon because we are all starting to keep our distance from each other without thinking about it.
Many stores have now installed plexiglass shields between the cashiers and the customers.
Stores that don’t have the money to install plexiglass have started hanging up clear plastic sheets.
All of the in-store workers are in masks.
More and more, stores are resisting taking cash because of the possibility of passing the virus back and forth.
All of the food that we are buying in these stores relies on many people who are putting themselves in danger every single day before we ever pick it up off a shelf.
Before we encounter the cashiers, who have to deal with hundreds of people a day, there are countless other people that get the food to us that we never see.
Meatpackers, farm workers, truck drivers, packagers, distributors.
Meatpacking plants across the country are experiencing major outbreaks of the virus because workers cannot properly distance themselves from each other.
Tyson just closed its largest plant in Iowa in light of an ever-growing number of cases of the virus among the workers. The latest in a growing list.
Packagers and shippers are protesting conditions at the facilities where they work.
Produce pickers tend to be at the lowest rung of the economic ladder often with no access to healthcare at all.
They are out there, though.
Picking.
ANYBODY out there still doing their jobs is putting themselves at a greater health risk than those of us who, who without jobs, are staying home.
I don’t want to suggest that staying at home is easy.
Families with no resources at all are having to scramble to find food and basic necessities.
Food banks all across the country are doing all they can to ramp up their food distribution abilities but there is only so much they can do.
Unemployment websites are overwhelmed by new applicants.
4.4 million new claims were filed last week in the US bringing the national total up to 26 million people.
It’s not over yet.
WHO is warning that world-wide rates of famine could, in the coming year, double.
And, people are terrified.
Home isolation is particularly hard on people who suffer from mental illnesses.
What’s not helping with us dealing with this situation at all is Politics.
Right from the beginning, Politicians have been part of the problem, not part of the solution.
Li Wenliang, the doctor in China who first alerted the public about an outbreak of a SARS-like illness, was immediately picked up by the Chinese police and admonished for spreading false rumors.
He went back to work at his hospital, contracted COVID-19 and died.
Our President refused to listen to warnings from health experts about the seriousness of this outbreak and wasted two months of time that could have been spent testing and isolating because it wouldn’t look good for his administration if the numbers were high.
Rather than face up to the reality and do the work he kept telling the public that it would just disappear like a miracle.
He’s STILL relentlessly underplaying the danger of this and telling the public that everything is OK and that it will be fine for everyone to reopen. His own health experts contradict him during the SAME PRESS CONFERENCES.
We now know, because of a recent autopsy in California, that the coronavirus was killing people in the US as early as February 9.
It will probably be discovered that there are even earlier cases.
There were already outbreaks of the virus in major cities by the end of February that hadn’t been identified yet. This information is going to change a lot of the projections.
Stay tuned.
Yesterday, the Mayor of Las Vegas gave the single most jaw-dropping interview that we have seen from a politician yet.
If you haven’t already seen it, please google it.
Mayor Carolyn Goodman tells Anderson Cooper that she would be willing to re-open the casinos in Las Vegas and use her citizens as a control group to see how the virus is spreading.
It doesn’t seem possible that what I am saying can be true, but I assure you, if you watch the interview, that she did.
The end result of all of this political noise is that, at best, mixed messages are being sent out across the nation.
For every clear-headed politician like Governor Cuomo, we have a whole army of opportunistic or just plain ignorant, idiots.
Like Mayor Carolyn Goodman.
During my walk north yesterday, the effect of this mixed messaging was readily apparent.
Walking north, you walk through more lower income areas than you do walking south.
It makes a difference.
The message is not getting through to everyone.
I saw groups of (mostly) guys hanging around together.
Several times, I saw other groups of guys greet each other with a kind of upper arm bump.
Not a handshake, true, but it put them in close contact with each other.
And none of them were wearing masks.
I saw Moms chatting together on the corner with their kids in tow.
And none of them were wearing masks.
This virus is hitting communities of color HARD.
Almost across the boards, people of color are losing their lives to COVID-19 at a far higher rate than white people are.
It has NOTHING to do with genetics and everything to do with economics and social stratification.
The sad truth is, if the people I passed on my walk north were wearing masks to protect themselves and each other, they would then be putting themselves at risk for even more racial harassment than they usually have to endure.
Lose - lose.
Phillip Pullman, a beautiful writer and the author of the His Dark Materials books wrote this yesterday, “The way we allow ourselves to be governed at the moment looks like the triumph of habit over putrefaction. We can’t go on like this.”
We really can’t.
We don’t have to.
We can take care of ourselves.
WE can choose to stay home to prevent this virus from spreading.
WE can choose to wear masks and keep a good physical distance from each other.
We are hearing nonsense that is growing in volume every day and WE can tune it out.
The path forward has no clear end in sight but, for the moment, the way is clear and WE can choose to stick to it.
WE choose who our leaders are, and WE can continue to do that.
Tonight at 7pm, make some noise outside your window for the people who are out there every day.
Make some noise for our incredibly brave healthcare workers but maybe add in a Whoo! for all of the cashiers and other workers who are out there too.
They are all heroes.
And we owe them.