Today my state fully opens, discarding those "annoying" and "overly burdensome" Covid precautions that have kept most of us alive and while isolated, safe for the past year and a half without so much as a heartfelt thank you. Many are celebrating, symbolically burning their masks, with some masks liberally doused with alcohol-based hand sanitizer--a double fuck you to Covid-19--while chomping at the bit to step out into the world bare-faced and proud of it. While I fully appreciate what a boon this will be for businesses, especially those who could never go in part or fully virtual and who rely on foot traffic, like restaurants, gyms, hair salons and bars, I, personally, am finding the whole situation...worrisome. In my state, as of today you can go just about anywhere without a mask as long as you are vaccinated, and whether you are or aren't is based on an "honor system". Oh, joy--what could possibly go wrong? In light of the fact that even my state hasn't reached the threshold of vaccinations to attain that magical and oft-mentioned "herd immunity", and that a new, far more dangerous variant, the Delta variant, is now circulating in major population centers like the SF bay area, will those of us who prefer to keep masking up, be harassed even more now than before, when masks were mandated?
I readily admit as someone who worked most of their life in the medical profession, where masks and the constant application of hand sanitizer and taking basic infection control procedures seriously were part and parcel of the job, it wasn't an undo burden to me to wear a mask when out, to use sanitizer liberally and often, to wash my hands repeatedly, and to keep commonly handled objects über clean. I won't bore you with my opinion on the weaponization of the pandemic by the political extremes. I won't talk about the simple, glaring fact that all of the ramifications of this pandemic, especially those human-made, will remain with us long after the pandemic is officially declared over (assuming it ever is). Entire forests have been pulped and rivers of ink have over-spilled their banks (metaphorically speaking) so pundits can expound about the cost in human lives (officially over 600,000 in the US alone, as of the writing of this--a figure that is, by most accounts, a gross low-balling of the actual number), the grotesque and gleeful display of utter selfishness on the part of some which, ironically, only made the disruptions worse and more prolonged, the destruction of low and middle-income "wealth", that it will take several generations for women, who were hit the hardest as far as wage-earners, to regain the ground they lost, and the upending of long-standing social norms this simple but very clever virus and its attendant issues have caused.
Simply put, we, as a species, did not cover ourselves in glory.
As someone who studied and wrote papers on the pandemic that swept across the world during WW1, I can honestly say people living 100 years ago showed more smarts than we have, and with a hell of a lot less to go on. You'd think with the advances in science, not to mention the rise of social media would have made us far more immune, left us far better prepared and more aware and willing to do what needed to be done to stop the virus in its tracks. In fact it had the opposite effect. It made us more tribal, more willing to believe the latest conspiracy theory or miracle cure, and perhaps the most damming of all, to see anyone who disagreed with us as the dreaded "other".
There are things about this past year and a half I readily confess I will miss. The random acts of kindness I witnessed. Strangers helping others, or just posting a sign, reminding everyone not to give into the darkness, like the one I came across in July of 2020, on my way to buy groceries.
I'll miss the wildlife, the creatures who normally remain hidden, coming out only at twilight or after dark in order to avoid humans, but which, starting in late March of 2020, started venturing out in the middle of the day. I knew we had bobcats and coyotes and wild turkeys in the area, but they were a rare sight, but not during the pandemic, at least not in my neighborhood. Bird species that used to be common but which had fled the urban/wildland interface decades ago as it became more congested with cars and noise, started to return, and with amazing speed. I saw (and heard) woodpeckers, flickers, wood pigeons, quail and hawks and on a daily basis and at dawn and dusk, the soft yipping of foxes, the distinctive, comical gobble of wild turkeys and once darkness fell, the hooting of great horned owls--three one night, one hooting, then another and another, from high up in the trees encircling my house, an avian ring around the rosy under the cover of darkness. My security cameras picked up on the usual nighttime suspects, raccoons, deer and opossums, but also skunks, wild rabbits and on one occasion, a juvenile wild boar.
Last spring and this were bumper years for nests and fledglings. Birds felt comfortable raising their young in the large planters that hang from my home's eaves and the lower limbs of the oak trees. The dawn chorus, which had almost disappeared, and what little remained had been swallowed up by the background din of a city awakening, returned and each month it got louder. Traffic noise from the highway that winds its way through the thick pine forest about a half mile from my home, a favorite among motorcyclists on their way to donate an organ or two at the local acute care hospital, was almost nonexistent for a good part of last year and the first part of this, even at the height of "rush hour". Traffic on my street, which I admit was never heavily traveled, was rare. Often times the only vehicles I saw in the space of an entire day was the mail truck, or FedEx and on Sundays nothing at all. It was so quiet, neighbors with small children drew a chalk hopscotch in the middle of the street and in between trying to help teach their kids via zoom classes would take them out to it to burn off some energy, with no fear that a car would whiz around the blind corner, leading to a tragedy.
While it is selfish to say, I'll miss all that. I'll miss the loss of the noise that goes with human activity. I'll miss all the little brown birds (my collective term for anything from house sparrow to towhee) who filled the silence with their song and chatter. I'll even miss the boar who rooted up some of my garden.
Today my state "opened up", but for weeks the return of humanity has been building: more traffic, more noise, far less civility. The chalk hopscotch is gone. Rather than refurbish it as the neighbors did once a week, two weekends ago the father hosed it off, leaving only a faint pastel smear on the asphalt to mark its passing. Now it's gone entirely, worn away by the tires of cars. Traffic, even on my narrow, dead end street, has returned.
As I said earlier, I did a lot of research on the 1918 pandemic, during my years at UC Berkeley, and also for a series of novels I wrote, in which a pandemic plays a pivotal role. I never thought I'd live through one. I naively thought we'd advanced enough, scientifically, technologically, and yes, socially, that an epidemic would be quashed long before it posed a pandemic threat. I was wrong, and I take no comfort in the fact that I wasn't alone in that gross underestimation of the general stupidity and arrogance of my fellow humans.
I just hope that by opening up, my state, along with the rest of the world, which is also opening up in fits and starts, despite most people not being vaccinated, despite all the variants, and more to come, won't be like Pandora, where all that remains inside the pithos is hope. Hope that the next pandemic won't be as unnecessarily terrible as this one has been.
(at top: Pandora, by Lawrence Alma-Tadema, 1881)
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