Remember the word "palinode," Gentle Readers? It means something written to retract something the writer wrote before. It is not used nearly as often as it should be these days.
What I'd like to retract this morning is a hasty answer I posted to a survey site yesterday. The survey site anonymized and aggregated it, but I want to retract it anyway.
I clicked "Yes, schools should refund tuition payments made by (or on behalf of) students for the term (or terms) when campuses have been locked down in quarantine."
The alternative was "No, schools should not refund tuition..." which I read at first as implying that they should just keep the money while the students aren't allowed to study anything on campus, which is obviously wrong.
But I thought of a better solution while walking in to work this morning. Wouldn't it save some paperwork, and thus some of the money schools waste on "administrative expenses," if the schools just held the money and applied it (with any interest it might accrue) to the students' tuition whenever they come back to classes?
Anyway, whatever the schools, students, and parents may do...I think that should be worked out among the individuals involved, not mandated by the federal government. One size generally fails to fit all.
That's what we're seeing with the coronavirus, as a majority of Americans respond to the nonstop surveys with "Yes, it's too soon to emerge from quarantine! The virus is not going away!" and a majority also respond with "Yes, healthy people should be allowed to go back to work! Most people can't tell whether they've had coronavirus or just another cold!"
"Just another cold" can kill people...probably not me, for a while yet, and probably not you, but some people.
I've posted this before, but some people may need a reminder: About twenty years ago I worked with a writer who used to stand behind me and watch what I was typing. I don't usually work in that kind of conditions, but this writer was a long-term client who'd become a personal friend. One Tuesday in summer she had a silly little summer cold, or maybe it was just allergies.
So, on the Thursday, I woke up with a silly little summer cold, or maybe it was just allergies. I sneezed two or three times. Big deal! No need for quarantine, right?
On the Saturday, my husband went upstate to spend Saturday night and Sunday morning with relatives, as he usually did. He provided some respite care for a special disabled student who was never able to speak. We never knew whether she had any religion, but she seemed to enjoy being with children who were being trained to be comfortable around people with major disabilities, at school during the school year and at Sunday School when possible. She was just starting to grow too big to be lifted easily, wheelchair and all, in and out of the minivan. She was small for her age because she'd spent a lot of time in hospitals and suffered a lot of stubborn infections.
And on the Monday, that child was hospitalized with staphylococcal pneumonia.
She never went back to school.
On the Saturday before her birthday, next November, I had knitted her a purple sweater for her birthday. My husband took it with him as he drove away. Two hours later he brought it back. I said, "What happened?"
He said, "She's gone."
Since then, when I've been exposed to a cold or flu, I've stayed away from anyone who has, for instance, had pneumonia during the past year. I may be working as usual. I may be shovelling snow, or even helping otherwise healthy people in and out of wheelchairs. That's not the problem. I don't want the person who is eighty years old, or is taking immune system suppressants, or has AIDS, to die from some silly little virus that's hardly even making the rest of us feel tired, if I can help it.
When I see the e-mails about these surveys showing that most people want to keep some level of quarantine but most people want to go back to work, those statistics make perfect sense to me.
People need to observe different levels of quarantine.
For most of us, the risk of exposure to airborne infections is small. If we have symptoms they're more inconvenient than painful. Usually we're the only ones who can tell we're reacting--we feel tired and grumpy, that's all--and if we tell people we have a virus infection they think we're only sprezzing and slacking. We can still lift one another out of wheelchairs if one of us happens to have injured both legs. We can still shovel snow. Certainly we can still process orders, or even write e-books, almost as well as ever. Sometimes the way I can tell I'm starting to react is that someone invited to guess my age guesses correctly; like most middle-aged and even young people, when I'm just a little bit ill I get visible wrinkles.
My usual reaction to cold and flu virus, which I have every reason to expect will be my reaction to coronavirus, is nothing compared to my reaction to glyphosate. (Yes, that was sprayed on the railroad last week. Yes, I was "sleepy" from kidney poisoning on Saturday; Sunday's rain helped me feel more alert; the bleeding ulcers in the digestive tract are still inflamed today; I still look as if I might be pregnant, I'm still finding blood in the toilet. Yes, I saw the rag somebody else had used to mop up whatever spewed out while they were in the car, and the dead sparrow without a mark on it, and the dead cat, on the way to work...as so many times before.)
But yes, of course some people are in more danger. They need to take the main responsibility for protecting themselves from infection. Nobody else (who is in their right mind) wants to make that more difficult for them. They do need to be staying at home, working from home, and staying ten (not only six) feet away from other people when they do go out. They need the options of completely home-based jobs and classes.
The Internet can be such a blessing to those people, if our government can check the greed, keep the Internet anonymous and leave censorship to the individuals involved, and thus make it relatively safe for the few people who need not to use public computer centers to have the Internet in their homes. (Of course, if we continue to allow corporate greedheads to demand personal information that can be stolen, we'll all have to back away and just let the Internet collapse...what I'm seeing at Yahoo and Twitter, not to mention F******k, is not encouraging.)
How do we able-bodied people avoid infecting one another with the trivial diseases that may kill our fragile loved ones? That's the more immediate question.
For a start we could look at ways to reopen schools, stores, offices, and restaurants along the lines we "germ-phobic, neurotic" introverts have been advocating for years.
* Six feet is the distance at which average adults, if they stretch out their arms and lean forward slightly, can shake hands. It is also the distance at which healthy people make conversation. We all need to stop allowing people to stand closer than that, even if their native culture has conditioned them to feel comfortable with less distance between people. Cultures where people don't maintain a good healthy distance are also cultures where the average life expectancy is shorter than that of "cold, distant" Anglo-Americans.
* Putting desks and counters between people who need to converse on the job, and full-length walls among people who need to focus on their desk work, is a good way to keep infections from circulating around offices. That felt "need" to remind junior employees of their low status by jamming them up against the wall and letting people walk up behind their backs has got to go. Extroverts' compulsions will drive them to find other ways to make their idiotic little dominance displays and raise the blood pressure of everyone around them, but at least their disease germs can be minimized by forcing them to speak to even junior employees across desks, wait for computer monitors to be swivelled around for them to read what's on the screen without touching other people or their keyboards, and generally stay out of other people's personal space.
* "Total taboo on touching" needs to be obligatory at schools and workplaces, whether coronavirus or other kinds of virus need to be contained.
* Masks and veils evolved in many cultures, worldwide, for valid reasons. Although Americans aren't sympathetic to the idea that any gender group or other social group should be ordered to use them across the board, we should develop tolerance for the idea that individuals may want and need to screen their faces. Even if we are "eye thinkers" we can learn to gather our visual cues from people's eyes and voices while they cover their mouths.
* Even those U.S. baby boomers who don't remember reading it in the Childcraft Encyclopedia (Volume 8) will recognize Paul Engle's suggestion that the cliche "packed in like sardines" could be replaced with "packed in like kids in a school bus"...and the days when parents (or schools) allowed that to happen are gone, and should come no more. Seats on school buses should be equipped with seat belts that separate children by at least six feet. No child should ever again have to sit with its arms and legs jammed up against those of another child who is coughing and sneezing.
We can and should go back to work, in spite of the virus. We can and should make workplaces healthier places for everybody, too.
(This has been "Conservative Content" post 2 of 4.)
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