Status Update: No Market This Friday

That there's no Friday Market this Friday totally bites. Last Friday was a major religious holiday, and on previous Fridays the weather was inconvenient, but this Friday, with the fantastic view of slowly greening hardwoods and clouds of dogwood and pink blushes of redbud, and the bright sunshine, and the first few irises beginning to bloom as the forsythia and Prunus fade...

It'll be worth the inconvenience if we all learn the right lesson, Gentle Readers.

Years ago, this web site quoted a cookbook writer who said that scallops became the emblem of medieval pilgrims (who were accustomed to eating other things) because on the way to the shrine of St. James of Compostela they used to eat scallops as a penance, and "I wish somebody would make me do the penance of eating Coquilles St Jacques"!

My townsfolk who are being forced to take an unplanned, unwanted spring break are lucky in a way. They are--I see and hear them, as I walk through town, maintaining a good healthy distance from them--they are spring-cleaning and grilling and working on projects and playing with their children and dogs and generally having fun. Apart from the alarming circular winds we caught off the edge of that tornado when it hit Chattanooga, the weather here in Gate City has been absolutely perfect for staying at home. If you ever wished someone would make you do the penance of admiring flowers on the prettiest days of spring, that's what my townsfolk are now "suffering" through. They're complaining like good fellows because they're losing money, but they are having fun.

This is American readers' first experience of full-bore totalitarian socialism. We've been living with various "socialized" schemes for handling this and that--unsustainable, and often unsatisfactory, and badly in need of revision, but they've not ruined us yet. Now some people want us to have a little tempting taste of having Big Government tell us where we can go, what we can buy and sell, when we can go to religious services, whom we can visit, and when it's convenient for Big Government to send everybody a handout check that, though it'd be a big pay raise for me, represents a terrible loss for a lot of people.
I'm looking forward to that check, too--not as a future lifestyle option, but as punitive damages.

I think the general idea of quarantine is a good one, and the 66% to 75% of poll respondents who say it's too soon to lift the quarantine have a point.

I think government went wrong by trying to order everybody to observe quarantine in lockstep, without regard to individuals' situations. I think Big Government always has gone wrong, when it's tried to impose top-down mandates on people for their own good, and it always will go wrong--for this reason. People's risks and concerns vary.

People have died, are dying, are going to die, from coronavirus and related pneumonia.

People have died, are dying, are going to die, from ordinary cold and flu virus and related pneumonia.

While one correspondent is bashing Dr. Fauci for not having called for a massive nationwide lockdown sooner, I'm remembering: All winter I've avoided visiting my own mother, or the cousin who baby-sat for us when my mother was young and hard-pressed. I've put off trying to arrange a car pool for the don't-say-it-but-this-could-be-the-last visit to each other that both of them wanted. I've even avoided riding with one car pool buddy, or speaking to her when I've seen her, because her father is old and frail too. Not even because of coronavirus; because of flu. I've been keeping a good healthy distance from people, not going to market on days when I would have gone in other years, wearing a shawl in temperatures when I would have left it at home in other years, running the heater at home when I didn't run it in other years, because of flu. I've not actually come down with flu myself--but I have felt it, and taken a few extra precautions with my own glyphosate-damaged body and extreme precautions with my elders.

So, meanwhile...Grandma Bonnie Peters distanced herself, socially and emotionally, from a lot of friends, fans, and relatives when she stopped driving and admitted she had pneumonia in 2015. Like the rest of us, I've seen her, chatted with her, almost like old times--but she's not made plans, with anybody, to do anything, so far as I can tell. When people have happened to catch her on a day when she felt willing to entertain or be entertained, she's been her old delightful self. When asked about plans for anything at all, she's been vague.

I talked to her on the phone a few days before the coronavirus panic. I thought, "Now, when everyone's over the flu, before the coronavirus gets here, is the time for a whole van load of these people to get together..." But somebody in Tennessee was still down with the flu that day, so the owner of the van didn't want to go out and let them have that don't-say-it's-the-last-time shopping trip together on the weekend before St. Patrick's Day--and then, although nobody in Virginia or Tennessee actually had the coronavirus, we were all ordered into quarantine. Because someone in New York was ill.

And where do you think GBP was on that Friday when the old friends weren't quite ready for the don't-say-it-might-be-the-last shopping run? Why, she was nursing her friend in Tennessee through the flu, that's where.

I've not been able to reach her since. The last few times I've not been able to reach her by phone, she's been ill. I don't expect she has coronavirus. I expect she has ordinary pneumonia from ordinary flu. And she might be walking to Wal-Mart again this summer, and she might die. And it will have been her own choice.

She always said she wanted to die with her boots on.

This is what I think we should all learn from the coronavirus panic: People have to claim the right, and take the responsibility, for their own choices about quarantines.

In my churchgoing youth, first as an undiagnosed celiac and even worse when I had mononucleosis, I was immune-compromised and really needed to maintain a good healthy distance from normal people--optimally, I shouldn't have been in church or school at all. But I thought the never-ending mono had to be "all in my mind," part of the "neurotic pattern" of being a creative introvert. I thought I was supposed to power through it. So I'd go to church when I wasn't ill enough to be sent home, and some horrible old bat or buzzard would flap up to me, coughing with their mouths wide open, "Oh, I've had this silly little cold that's going around too, what a bore, but I'm so-o-o glad to see you!" And they'd grab me. My skin would crawl from head to toe, and they'd grab me and pat me and breathe virus in my face, and by morning I'd be coughing and sneezing again.

Never mind that most of their virus had been "killed." Virus are only barely classifiable as lifeforms--it's not always possible to tell whether they are dead or alive--and immune-compromised people react to killed virus too, it seems. The sick old people at church would go home and feel better. I'd go home and feel worse. It was literally true that these "friendly greetings" on the way home from church services were draining the life out of me, for their apparent short-term benefit.

You couldn't have told me at that time that I needed to quit going to church. Later, when I saw that the emotional affection these people were literally drooling and spitting on everyone else was not going to grow into any motivation for any practical benefit to the people they "loved" so much, I came to that decision for myself--but at nineteen I loved my "church family" and would probably have made myself ill, or at least miserable, if I'd been ordered to stay home.

I lived. I learned. I learned that there's nothing "neurotic" about either creativity or introversion, or about keeping a good healthy distance from other people, either. I learned that when I stopped eating wheat, then until food processors started spraying glyphosate right on food and splicing genes from E. coli into food crops so the plants could be drenched in glyphosate, in 2009, I could be a normal healthy person. During those gluten-free-and-healthy years it might have been a neurotic habit to insist on keeping a healthy distance from everybody.

I didn't insist. I liked having the freedom to let children climb up me, let lonely old people lean on me, even let young men I dated kiss and cuddle at that stage of my life.

But then there was the summer...One of my writing clients used to stand right behind me and dictate. She had a silly little summer cold, one Tuesday. I had a silly little summer cold on the Thursday. My husband had it on the Saturday when he went upstate to give some respite time to the caretakers of a disabled child. On the Monday that child was taken to the hospital and diagnosed with staphylococcal pneumonia. She came home later that summer, but she never was strong enough to go to school that fall--and she liked school. I had knitted a purple sweater (she liked purple) for her birthday in November. My husband took it with him when he went upstate, then turned around, came home, and reported, "She's gone."

If it hadn't been my writing client's summer cold it would have been something else, we both knew...but I was more conscientious about avoiding anyone who seemed old or frail, when I had or had not noticed even the silliest of little summer colds, after that.

I think we should keep the social distance going until everyone has either recovered from coronavirus or died from it. I think some people's difficulty is that they don't know what social distance is. Standing six feet from another adult means, for most of us, that if you reach out and I reach out at the same time, by leaning forward just slightly we could choose to shake hands. Some people are actually standing ten or fifteen feet apart, which is all to the good for their health, and requires only a little more mindfulness about speaking and listening if they want to have a conversation.

I think we should let people make their own decision to stay home, work from home or not work, without prejudice if and when they come back to work (or school or church), whenever they may have been exposed to anything...bearing in mind that it is up to the immune-compromised to quarantine themselves. Nobody else can do it for them, even if we try. If you are one of the people who is likely to die from staphylococcal pneumonia six months after someone breathes on you, you need to be the one to decide your uncle should stay in the city and not bring any little summer colds into your home.

If you are immune-compromised and you want to go to school, go to work, play sports or go on dates like other people your age...you should probably be required to read "The Lady of Shalott" aloud, and reflect on it for a day or two, but if you then choose to mingle with friends, then the responsibility for shortening your life is yours entire and alone.

You cannot demand that healthy people not mingle with each other, and swap all those staph and strep and other bacteria, common cold and flu virus, and green mold organisms that are constantly and harmlessly present in their breath, because you have no resistance to these things.

Neither should anyone demand that you, as an immune-compromised person, mingle with others. No child should ever be sent to school when the child has a cold and wants to stay home. Nobody should ever feel that if he or she takes a day off work, he or she will not have a job the next day.

I don't think government should order people to go back to work this week. I don't think government should authorize employers to put any kind of pressure on anybody to go back to work. I think government should just back off, and let people go back to work when they and their employers and employees feel confident that none of them is likely to die from coronavirus, or to be unable to avoid transmitting the virus to a family member who is.

I think we should maintain and even expand respect for people's individual quarantines that they choose to observe after consultation with their doctors.

I think everybody should read Hiding Ezra and think about how haphazardly whole communities survived epidemic diseases for hundreds of years when people didn't understand how diseases spread. Plenty of communities didn't survive at all. In Europe we still know the names of the towns that were destroyed by plagues. In North America we've never put most of those towns on the maps.

We have a lot of young parents who are being forced to depend on unsustainable federal handouts to keep roofs over their children's heads. That's not right. Their being forced into that horrible position is not going to keep people from dying of coronavirus--or of ordinary viral pneumonia from last winter's ordinary flu. These working parents and their children are watching their lives collapse in order to protect them from what, when they inevitably get it, is going to be just another kind of chest cold. That's not right.

We have a lot of frail, sickly people who aren't going to be celebrating the Fourth of July this year, whether people have avoided visiting them all winter or avoid doing anything else at all this spring. Some of those people may live another year or another ten years, or a few of them may even live another fifty years, if they choose to observe strict quarantine now. Some of them aren't going to see the fireworks on this Fourth of July in any case. Some of them may choose to die of pneumonia now and be done with it rather than suffer through longer, nastier final illnessses.

To think that two and two are four, and neither five nor three, the heart of man has long been sore, and long will likely be.

Me? I'm middle-aged--in cyberspace I've always been part of the older generation, but in real life I'm only just starting to qualify for any kind of "seniority." I live high on a hill, above the town, where my grandfather and his siblings lived long healthy lives watching their friends die from Spanish Influenza and tuberculosis and this and that. I live much as they lived. Even the celiacs in Mother's family have shown the effects of the longevity gene. I expect that after exposure to coronavirus I'll do some coughing and sneezing, stay home in bed as long as I feel feverish and stay away from nervous people for another week or two, and then feel fit as a fiddle. As so many times before. I expect to lose a few elders to the virus. As so many times before--we are losing our older generation.

And if I'm wrong, well, I've lived in such a way as to look forward to joining most of my favorite people in the Good Place, which is what people should really be concerned about during any virus panic. I have another fifty or sixty years' worth of projects I'd like to finish before I die, but at fifty I've already lived longer than, probably, the majority of humans who've lived on Earth; I'm ready to go. As Grandma Bonnie Peters was--and still is, I suppose, not having heard that she's died. I'd like to be the home nurse people request when I'm 85, but that's for God to decide.

But I seriously do not expect, after reading what survivors say, that the coronavirus is going to be anywhere near as unpleasant for me as any of the glyphosate reactions our government is still allowing fools to inflict on me every few weeks. Maybe our government should be doing something about glyphosate reactions, which are caused by a voluntary human behavior our government could and should recognize as a crime. Our government should not be trying to do anything about virus, which are not subject to human control.

I think the federal government has contributed nothing good to people's efforts to avoid or survive any virus, and should not try to dictate what efforts people make in that direction, ever again.