Long Division

I wear a mask when we walk the dogs and when I see someone approaching a block away, I cross the street. I haven’t been in a store or a restaurant since March 13th. I wash the mail, well, not really. I let it sit in the front hall for a couple of days, push it around with my foot to see if there are any important bills. I text, I Zoom, I email but I don’t see any of my friends or family in person – not from six feet away, not from twenty.

The experts said that Covid-19 was super-contagious and really dangerous and that was all I needed to hear. I am all over prevention like it’s a new career and it kind of is. My new career is staying alive and well.

But across town, not in some different state or country, but across town, hundreds of people gathered over the weekend to protest Wisconsin’s Stay at Home order. They were shoulder to shoulder, not wearing masks, little kids running around, a lot of shouting and yelling, heavy duty Don’t Tread on Me vibe and I wonder: Am I orbiting Zorkon?

I’m not shocked that some people would be urging that the government allow certain businesses to reopen. I don’t agree but I could see that argument. It would be possible to have a thoughtful debate about that – over the phone or in a web meeting or some other venue where no one’s spit could fly through the air and land on your eyebrow. You know how heated such a discussion could get.

So I am cool with a big huge difference of opinion.

What I don’t get is how come I’m crossing the street if I see someone approaching from a block away while people on the other side of town are standing so close they can smell each other’s deodorant?

We have a pretty fundamental and possibly paralyzing dichotomy here. Because these wildly different responses to the same facts represent something far bigger than a difference of opinion about a disease. It feels like an almost cataclysmic division, a divorce, Americans divorcing each other in the most hostile, life-threatening way.

I don’t understand it, obviously. I’m not that smart. I am intuitive though and my intuition tells me this is more and bigger and worse than politics or Fox News or Trump. It’s a sickness, I fear, that is way more life altering and life threatening than what’s going around.

We are going to need big healing from this. All of it.