March 24, 2020: Five Imperatives Redux, Pt 2 - Ramifications of Ramping up Isolation Measures -

Part two of today's thoughts, Ramification:

In another local example of competing imperatives: yesterday the governor announced that we would tighten up our isolation measures. And in the next couple of hours, an interesting thing happened.

We live on a very busy street in the Hawthorne district, a thoroughfare, and it has been nearly free of traffic for days. Granted, I’ve been holed up in one room, not sitting at the window, but it isn’t hard to hear traffic, and I have emerged from time to time to sit in the yard, and it has been SO QUIET. And then the governor made her announcement, and the sound of traffic picked up. I went and watched – trucks, trucks, trucks, cars, cars, cars, CARS, CARS….

I thought: what are these people doing? We’ve all been doing 2 so well, staying home, flattening the curve, and suddenly there’s a traffic jam on 20th Avenue? Why did you abandon the good fight?

And then I thought about the Italian mayors (great video, scroll down my page) yelling at people to really and TRULY go home and lock down. We aren’t at the Italian mayor stage here. We just took a step closer to the Italian mayor stage. And I think many people got alarmed that we were HEADING to the Italian mayor stage, and maybe we needed to rush out and do ONE LAST THING before that edict came down. It wasn’t the actual edict-o-day that sent people running out to do an important errand. It was the specter of the next edict.

Where was everybody going? Was it yet another toilet paper panic? I didn’t know, but I knew that my dream, these past feeling-crummy days, has been to feel good enough to walk the 16 blocks to my studio, and to do some painting. And I thought UH-OH. What if by the time I feel that good, I can’t walk to my closet-sized studio without an Italian mayor tongue lashing?

Maybe I should get some stuff from the studio.

But if I get stuff from the studio and I DO still have (mild) COVID then I’m out there shedding virus…. But the studio is accessible by key card, I can do gloves, etc., hold my breath, touch nothing, not one single surface, between my car and the inside of the locked room, I will see no one, I will pack up a few things and then if we are stuck here for weeks, I will be able to keep from going nuts because my pastime will be here.

(I blame this entire thing on Keb’ Mo’’s son, who shot a home movie of the Mo’s at home (down the page), which I watched with utter delight until I saw them noodling on the piano and I thought well, SURE, you have your piano in your HOUSE, you are going to be okay, but me, I’m sixteen BLOCKS from the studio!)

So the conundrum: If I shower in alcohol and wear clean clothes and all the protective gear and go to the studio, do I kill a little old lady in Dubuque? I maybe didn’t ever have COVID. I maybe don’t have it any more. Probably don’t. At day nine, with a last bit of chest stuff and no fever and some other symptoms not contagious, never mind (but I always cough, I have allergies, it’s spring, I own an inhaler for a reason .... right?) was I committing a moral crime to go get some stuff from the studio and bring it home for mental health in a long lockdown?

Here’s what I will tell you. The parking lot was full.

A lot of people rent space in the building not for retired-person fun, but for their own small biz. They were afraid they would not be able to go from their homes to their work (locked room, building with key card entrance!) if things clamp down more. They had thought they could do Imperatives 2 and 4 at the same time, and suddenly they thought that soon that might no longer be possible, and they would go broke. They were packing up.

Some of them. I saw one tossing stuff into her car. Otherwise I saw only one other in the time I was there. She had somebody in her space with her*, and she had the door open, and I judged her harshly.

(I saw one person from afar. I saw one miscreant chatting in her tiny room with another human, with the door open. I saw no one else, but the parking lot was empty when I went down (one trip, touching NOTHING) with my bags of stuff, headed for home. Nice work, people. Ghosts.)

But I’m trying to judge people less harshly now, though I will admit that when somebody said No, your point 5 (we don’t have tools to assess where we are) needs to be “We don’t have a vaccine,” I got a little grim at the thought of people who will not get a vaccine when we have one, or rather those who will be ABLE to get one and tolerate it, but STILL won’t do it, because they do not care enough about 1 – the herd.

*She was giving someone a haircut. I heard the Italian mayor on this subject, saying, “You understand the casket will be CLOSED?!”