There are people right now making extraordinary and heroic sacrifices as this virus grips our country and our world.
Nurses, doctors and others working on the front lines of health care are risking their lives every minute of every day to care for the sick and dying. Many can’t be with their families out of fear they will bring COVID-19 home. Many more first responders and those working in grocery stores, transportation trucks, warehouses and factories are going to work every day under extraordinarily stressful conditions so that the rest of us can stay home and complain about being cooped up and bored.
For the vast majority of us, this pandemic is asking very little in comparison to those on the front lines.
Stay home and stop gathering with people you don’t live with. That’s it.
Hopefully, harsh penalties such as fines and potential jail time will deliver the message to some people who think these rules don’t apply to them. These next few weeks will be a critical time in bringing the spread of this unrelenting virus under some measure of control.
What is truly scary is that our health and that of all those we love is in the hands of many people who have no social conscious or sense of collective responsibility. There are legions of stories of people in large groups gathering on beaches, in churches, and in private homes, businesses that have not closed despite orders to do so, callous idiots in grocery stores not keeping the appropriate distance from others, even dangerous fools on buses and trains not covering their coughs.
Certainly, there are people who act naively, stupidly, foolishly and selfishly in every crisis: the guy who kite-surfs as a hurricane approaches or the people who refuse to follow evacuation orders as floods or wildfires bear down.
The difference here is that the foolhardy and reckless who refuse to take this pandemic with the grim realism and unified response it demands put us all at risk.
You are coming in close contact with people you don’t live with? Making unnecessary trips out of your house? Defying physical distancing when out in public? Hosting gatherings in your house?
If so, you are directly contributing to more people in the hospital, more deaths, a greater economic toll, and a longer time period over which we will have to cope with this new reality.
I’m all for the emergency measures that give extraordinary powers to police and other authorities. Yes, that curtails our civil liberties in ways none of us want or ever foresaw as a possibility. But the reality is, we can’t trust everyone to do the right thing. Some have to be forced.
People at house parties, out golfing, crowding together on walking trails or heading to cottages where communities can’t bear the influx should be fined and should be ashamed.
I will happily forego some of my rights in these extraordinarily dangerous times if it means lowering the devastating toll of this microscopic enemy. The vast majority of people are doing exactly as they should, and we should all be grateful to one another for that.
Those who can’t see their way to acting in the name of public good, who put themselves above all else, are facing a reckoning that only a deadly pandemic could bring.