Archive: Opinions

Interesting how much Hollywood shapes our perceptions.  Being in a high risk demographic for the coronavirus, I hadn't left the house in a month.  But the weather was quite lovely Monday afternoon, so my wife and I decided to take a walk along Cayuga Lake at Myers Park.  For some reason I expected to see the landscape leveled, red and dusty, and Mel Gibson riding around fighting an Australian motorcycle gang in classic 'Mad Max' style.  I don't know why I was surprised to see the very lovely park that it always is.

In fact, the only signs that the pandemic is on were that there was less than the usual small amount of traffic on the way to the park, there weren't very many people at the park at all, and a literal sign saying the Town recommends wearing a face mask and practicing social distancing.  But an underlying fear caused by this virus is eroding fundamential faith in our safety and our country's myth of invulnerability.  "It can't happen here" doesn't apply to the United States any moe -- did it ever?  Yet we thought it did, and that mattered.

Of the people we saw at the park zero wore face masks, and 100% practiced social distancing.  Most people waved, all from a safe distance, and if our paths crossed, people waited for other people to pass, maintaining the recommended six feet or more.

This expectation of a dystopian landscape took me by surprise.  I am a hermit by nature, so being holed up hasn't been nearly as difficult for me as it is for my wife, who is an extremely social person.  And I have to admit that as a fairly driven person I feel guilty when I am not doing something productive, as if the 'doing something police' are looking over my shoulder, monitoring whether I am being productive.  A silver lining of this isolation is that, knowing everyone is doing it, I don't feel anxious about just sitting around and reading a book.  Or taking a nap.  Or just looking out the window.

But I have, it seems, developed an irrational paranoia about going outside.  Taking the trash to the end of the driveway once a week has made me worry about tiny, invisible alien monsters swirling around in the air outside, waiting to suck out my brain.

Then I remember that there isn't anyone around, which means no brain sucking due to trash removal.  It's just outside.  It's the same outside it was before the pandemic hit.  The same outside it was before all the national news was about COVID-19, and you really had to search to find news of anything else.  I am fairly happy looking at it outside the window, but there is nothing to be afraid of in a rural setting with no other people in sight.

The impending sense of doom that seems to come from weeks of isolation, one-note journalism, and boredom is certainly an over-reaction, but it doesn't hurt to have a little something to remind us that this is a real thing, and a serious threat to all of us, especially those in the high risk demographics.  As of this writing we are very lucky that the only two coronavirus deaths were people who had been moved from downstate to our local hospital -- no Tompkins County residents have died, and the current count of residents who have tested positive for COVID-19 is quite small compared to many other communities.

Or maybe luck has nothing to do with it.  Our local health department has been admirably proactive in dealing with the virus, and remarkably factual in terms of how they report to the public.  This encourages faith in their recommendations, and it seems as if the community at large has taken those recommendations to heart.  Social distancing, face masks, and hand washing are not hard.  It's a matter of believing they are necessary and just doing them.  Our community seems to be doing just that, and the results are encouraging.

Despite evidence to the contrary, we have, as a culture, long believed in the Superman-ness of the United States.  We grew up knowing it was the best and most powerful country in the world, and a certain sense of pride and safety comes with that.  Setbacks in the news -- Americans killed abroad, military challenges, etc. -- could be shrugged off to a certain extent because, well, this is the best country in the world and we're all lucky to live here.

That may be true, but this coronavirus is a great leveler.  As of this writing (Wednesday) there had been 177,688 COVID-19 related deaths world-wide. Around 24,648 of these deaths occurred in Italy, which has the second highest novel coronavirus fatality count.  45,343 of them were here in the United States.  Despite the relative safety we enjoy in Tompkins County doe to a pro-active health department and a community that is largely engaging in safe practices, one can't help but worry that we, as a nation, are not safe.  That sense of safety has always been a given where our country is concerned.  Now, not so much.

The challenge now is to not get too cocky and rush to go back to normal.  That could prompt the disaster our vigilance has prevented in our county up to now.  But it is comforting to know, as I learned Monday afternoon, that when we do all get to go out and mingle again, the world outside will still be pretty much as we remember it.  Not a dystopian, decimated, dusty, devastated landscape.  And no Mel Gibson.

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