I have a large house, a garden, a dance studio, a piano, several pets. I sing, I play, I dance, I nurture, I love, I have enough money, I have open air.
I do not have my chorus, my music club, my access to making music with friends, which six months later is a terrible loss. My two daughters who live in other states are unable to visit their mother because of quarantines. I am relatively fine, as most middle to upper class persons currently are.
But the loss of my music making, loss of human contact, loss of movies, and plays and yoga classes are taking its toll. I, who have always been of a very sound mental, emotional, psychological and spiritual constitution, am getting depressed.
Take a moment to imagine how people who are crammed in apartments with others, with no yards, their neighborhood bodegas are closed so they are forced to take public transportation to go buy vegetables except for the kind one can find in a gas station, their parks are closed, their kids are crammed in their apartment with them all day, they did not get a stimulus check if they are currently getting public assistance. If I am having trouble, then these people are in extreme danger of food deprivation, mental illness, domestic violence and the like. These are the people I am concerned about. They will not survive this. As we all well know, a great many of these people are people of color.
Then there are the small businesses that are closing in droves in my once bustling town. No more small businesses can survive, so say goodbye to one major route out of poverty for many. How about the sports venues that so many of our youth used to get a college education, gone. Any kid who is a junior or senior in high school and dreamed of a career in music, theater, film, opera etc, can kiss their dreams goodbye. Our kids are home not socializing, not learning, scared of their friends' breath.
Is this the world you want to live in? Because until we stop believing that the medical industry is helping us with this problem, by essentially doing nothing but telling us we should give up human contact for as long as they say so (which has already gone on for far longer than they told us it would) then we are screwed.
We'll all be dead by the time those bozos get through with us.
Do not condescend to me.
I apologize if I sounded harsh; these are all legitimate concerns, and I'm fully on board with the fact that the lack of socialization is horrible for humans in general. COVID has absolutely disproportionally affected people of color who don't have the same access to resources that we do, and it will only widen the economic divide in many ways. I completely agree with the majority of everything you wrote in that reply, and the loss of extracurriculars is just another shot to the gut for many of our youth who were already struggling with a lack of peer contact before.
We may disagree on the means that should be taken, but I agree that the second-order effects of this are nothing to be taken lightly.
Thank you for your thoughtful response. I really appreciate that.
I consider the measures are useless to stop the spread (we have seen that), more harmful than covid itself, and highly discriminatory. It's not the spread we need to worry about, but the treatment, of which there is still nothing. I find that disgraceful. We are supposed to have such a competent medical industry, yet they still have nothing they can do to help the very small percent of patients who get really sick. So what do those patients have in common? For one, the vast majority (not all) have lots of western meds coursing through their veins, especially old folks. Perhaps it's not the co-morbidities that are complicating covid, but the heavy meds the patients are taking for their pre-existing conditions; medically toxic bodies can not fight covid well, they go into overdrive. Blood pressure medications are suspect. Antacids are suspect. And the flu vaccine has been shown to exacerbate covid. Nearly every nursing home resident gets a flu vaccine twice a year. Flu vaccine season is right around the corner now, and we can be sure to see severe covid cases rise at the same time; right now we are seeing more infection rates, but hospitalization and death rates are way down. Will the rises in severity during vaccination season just be coincidence? I pray it doesn't happen, I really do. We'll see.
Add to that that there IS an effective, safe and inexpensive treatment that has been forbidden for use by the very entities who have told us to shut down our lives, and, well, I wonder just what their agenda is.
I am happy to take my chances with covid. The alternative is far worse for every single one of us.