Lawrence Hall
Another Lockdown?
Another lockdown?
We haven’t been unlocked from the first one.
Masks are still required – and rightly so – as are social
distancing, sheets of clear plastic in all businesses, health questions before
appointments, those menacing little plastic temperature guns that gatekeepers
aim at our foreheads, hand sanitizer, anti-viral aerosols, ventilation, and the
good hygienic practices our parents and teachers taught us.
I live beneath the approach to Houston Intercontinental,
and I can sit outside in the fresh autumn air in the evenings and remark on the
now rare experience of seeing an airplane made brilliant in the hidden sun as
it descends with its manifests of people hoping to find their hearts’ delight
at their journey’s end.
The multi-named virus is real. The spouse-person and I can
count two friends and some twelve acquaintances who have died from it in our
rural county.
But the denials continue and the masks do not.
The afternoon casualty lists on the local news always end
with words to the effect of, “All but one had pre-existing conditions.”
The slackers.
Some reporters have a gift of making it sounding Darwinian,
as if the dead were somehow at fault.
Some 60,000 young Americans were killed in Viet-Nam (my
frame of reference; I’m old) – no one ever thought to add, “but most of them
had pre-existing conditions.”
There are few communities who haven’t lost some of their
finest young men and women in the numerous undeclared wars so beloved of our governments
for generations. Yet not even the most callous presidents and the mostly
harmless members of Congress have attempted to calm the families of the dead with
assurances (or accusations?) of pre-existing conditions.
If the remains of your child or young friend are returned
home from some Whodumbideawasthisistan, there would be no comfort to the family
in the chaplain saying, “but she had a pre-existing condition.”
But the perhaps 250,000 killed by the CV (or whatever it’s
being called this month) are dismissed almost casually with the sneaky deflection
of, “well, most them had pre-existing conditions.”
Everyone has a pre-existing health condition; there are
no perfect physical specimens.
The reality is that refrigerated trailers aren’t lined up
at hospitals because of pre-existing conditions. People aren’t set out in
crowded corridors or tents on oxygen or ventilators because of broken legs, measles, ‘flu, colds,
migraines, appendicitis, or hurt feelings.
They’re dying of the CV.
So put away the ego and the ideologies.
Go to work and wear your mask.
Wash your hands. Often.
Keep your distance.
Mind your coughing.
Take your temperature.
Slather on the hand sanitizer.
Keep MeeMaw and PawPaw alive.
Keep your children alive.
Keep yourself alive.
Peace.
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