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My Pearl Harbor Moment
On April 5, the Surgeon General warned us that we needed to brace ourselves for the worst week in our lives. The coming week, and the week that followed, were expected to be the pinnacle of the crisis, and we had to be prepared: “This is going to be our Pearl Harbor moment, our 9/11 moment, only it’s not going to be localized. It’s going to be happening all over the country, and I want America to understand that.”
But now that we have made it through the hell that was the last two weeks, I find myself with a moment to look back on the miseries I have just survived, as difficult as it is to think about some of them.
Like the time last week when my daughter put a particular flavor of gelato on the grocery list. But the first store I went to didn’t have that flavor, so I had to go to another store.
Or the time I was in the mood for a good burger, but I discovered that our favorite local burger place was temporarily closed. I thought about just going to McDonald’s, but they’re offering only a limited menu right now, and I didn’t feel like compromising.
And then, on another night when we were in the mood for Mexican, the local place was so busy that they didn’t answer the phone the first time I called to place an order. I had to call them again from the parking lot and then sit there and wait for almost 15 minutes before they brought our order out to the car.
Meanwhile, the liquor store has adopted a “one customer at a time” policy, so I had to wait in line outside for almost five minutes before my turn.
But on a more serious note, I have been watching as our state grapples with a health-care crisis of unimaginable proportions. According to the statistics I’ve seen, our hospitals are almost nearly overwhelmed, with several hundred of the state’s 7,000 hospital beds occupied.
I knew, before the Surgeon General’s wakeup call, that this pandemic was going to be very hard on some people in some places. That there were people who were sick, and others who were putting their lives on the line to help them. But if I hadn’t been warned, I wouldn’t have known that during these last two weeks the suffering would spread to every corner of the country and be the “hardest and saddest” time in most of our lives. And yet somehow we survived.
Someday people will ask me what it was like to live through the national hell that was April of 2020, and I will just have to tell them: “There’s no way you can possibly understand.”
Published in General
Now listen @bartholomewxerxesogilviejr: You are obviously not a woman in desperate need of a cut and color. 15 minutes for Mexican carry out pales in comparison to the life-shattering anxiety of waiting to get back to the hairdresser. Oh the humanity!
My partner in time (that’s what I call my wife) managed to snag a secret rendezvous with her hairdresser today. Slunk in the back door of her shop, because she keeps the blinds down since it’s been *ahem* closed.
I’ve told my hairdresser I’ll meet her in the woods or the middle of the river if necessary. Seriously though this is a business that could have been open with physical distancing and precautions the whole time.
And the nail salon! <Looking mournfully at my once-nice manicure….)
4200 Americans died of Covid yesterday, or so Drudge Report says. Let’s not trivialize this.
Nobody’s trivializing anything. We’re having a discussion.
One of the points of the post is that maybe 4200 Americans died yesterday, but they were all in NYC.
Out here in the real world it’s mostly just inconvenience and societal destruction. And waiting.
(NYC, the one where the subways are still operating and full.)
Sounds trivial to me, compared to a hundred million out of work.
On average, 7,700 people in the US die every day, 2.8 million per year. I can’t find it now, but someone here posted recently that total US deaths in the past few months are down compared to that daily average.
When someone you love is vulnerable, you won’t find it trivial.
One of my favorite articles ever.
–I know lots of people who are suffering. Including a friend of mine who is worried where his son with CF is going to get fed or a roof over his head, because his father cant work right now.
Right – so let’s stop using the word “trivial” to describe the difficulties of others.
Comments like this are an embarrassment to this site, as is the OP.
To be fair to the original poster, he was making the point that for him, and maybe the vast majority of the nation, it has not been that difficult to manage the pandemic, at least in medical terms. It has mostly been characterized by inconvenience. I too have no sympathy for those on the couch watching Netflix, still getting a paycheck, hoping to bask in the glow of surviving our D-Day, or whatever. This is not trivializing the sickness or death of others.
The point is that it varies greatly by location and circumstances. Deaths should not be trivialized, but what should also not be trivialized is the suffering caused by the shutdowns. It has become almost a cliche now, but it has the benefit of being true: no business is non-essential to the owner – or to the employees out of work, to those that rely on the business, and to the families of the lot. There is a cost, also in lives, for this imposed economic devastation. Later, we might call this a recession, or maybe a depression, but it is most certainly a Great Suppression.
Why?
But it’s a perfectly, and exactly appropriate word. The number of deaths is indeed trivial, except for two or three cities, where is it slightly more than trivial. Austin has had 21 deaths total. Not today, but since the first discovery of the virus in our city. I’m sorry, but that is trivial. For that trivial number of deaths, we have shut down the city. Whether it it wise or not is a different matter. Whether the number is low because we shut down the city remains to be determined. But the number of deaths as of now is quite trivial.
Why would you presume to know what I would think? Do you think I am incapable of separating emotions from logic?
Jean, that is not true. People that I love are vulnerable. Heck, I am vulnerable — only 52, but obese and a former smoker.
I haven’t thought of it before, but do you think that there is an element of virtue signaling in the overreaction to this virus? I hypothesize this both for the overreaction in general, and for the more annoying manifestations of it (like the facemask snitches, who I have heard of but have not yet seen myself, thankfully).
I didn’t say that we should stop using the word “trivial” to describe the numbers – it is indeed trivial when compared to, say, heart disease-related deaths. I said we should stop using the word trivial when describing the difficulties of others. NYC is part of the “real world”, so dismissing deaths there as trivial because, well, it’s NYC seems pretty callous.
I live in a small town (5,000 people) in Minnesota, Lake City. It would be easy to dismiss this whole thing as not affecting me, but unfortunately it does. My husband is in the late stages of congestive heart failure (and kidney disease, and a few other things…) which means he is frequently hospitalized at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester. If there’s going to be a place where you’re going to find some Covid19 patients, it’s probably Mayo! Now, this morning my husband’s weight is up by 5 pounds from yesterday – all fluid. The question, is, can I risk taking him to Mayo? Can I risk not taking him to Mayo? This stuff isn’t trivial when it comes down to someone you love.
I think so much of this conversation is a waste of space anyway, as one-size-fits-all just won’t work. Minnesota isn’t New York. Lake City isn’t Minneapolis.
I kind of wonder about that myself! I was in Walmart a week or so ago, not wearing a mask, and a woman who was wearing one shooed me away from walking down the same aisle that she was in. If looks could kill I would be in the morgue right now. And fer Pete’s sake – as I mentioned above, I have good reasons to be especially cautious given my husband’s condition – I’m not being careless. But puhhh-leeze!
Let me clear this up. I wasn’t saying the deaths in NYC are trivial. They’re not, they’re horrific.
I was saying that to force the same restrictions on everybody else in the state is ludicrous, when our situation is completely different. If the deaths were evenly spread throughout the state, and we all had an equal chance of catching the virus, then of course, same proscriptions for all. But that’s not the situation. We are up here, all alone in lakes and cow pastures, with, by comparison to NYC, zero virus problems. Yet everybody is maintaining their distance, going to absurd lengths to keep away from each other. In NYC, the place with almost all of the problems, they are still cramming into subways! Seriously?? And we’re all sitting here, not allowed to work, slowly starving to death.
I’m not dismissing them. But if that’s where the problem is, and they take it with such a lack of seriousness that they still jam into subway cars by the thousands every day, well I’d call that callous.
I have lived on my sailboat, spring, summer, and fall, alone, for the past ten years. In a marina with 90 other boats. Few others live aboard, so most of the time I am alone in the whole boat basin. But others come and go, and we are all responsible people. There is an occasional picnic together, but they are not necessary in these times, and probably wouldn’t be organized this season.
But now I am told that my boat may not be launched so I can sail up to the club, because sailing is “non-essential”. It may be (to you), but it is also not dangerous in any way, virus-wise. So why is it banned? What is the logic? What does depriving me of what is my home for the next six months serve?
I thought banned things were supposed to be things where congregating takes place, and there is an obvious good chance of breathing all over each other, but which are deemed “non-essential”. Like movie theaters, restaurants, subway cars.
To ban so called “non-essential” things where no congregating takes place, where there is little to no chance of breathing on each other, is pointless, mean, and demonstrably counter-productive.
You can keep people conforming to the distancing rules – keeping themselves and others safe – and putting up with governmental obtuseness and glory-seeking, a lot longer if you back off from simply forbidding everything you can think of that’s not a grocery store. Most things we do are not dangerous, virus-wise.
Thanks for the clarification!
You are my hero. I have always wanted to live that way.
But your boat could break down and you requiring rescuing thus putting lives in danger.
Danger? From me?? I live alone on a freaking sailboat! And we drink Pusser’s rum on my boat – viruses flee this stuff, the same way human mortals should.
Yes, but you might need help so others may have to come in contact with your irresponsible behavior by not doing what your moral superiors know is best.
So, this has been happening in my neck of the woods:
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/04/17/business/nearly-third-200-blood-samples-taken-chelsea-show-exposure-coronavirus/
(And yes it’s The Boston Globe, but the article does manage to do a competent job and keep the progressive axe-grinding to a minimum.)
This thing is widespread, and grinding along, and it’s premature at best to chalk that up as a positive.
As I’ve discussed elsewhere, I fled from my Tokyo abode back to the US in late February — had been hoping I would be able to take refuge in Fortress America while looking after my parents. I’ve been able to do the latter — the former, well, we know how that’s gone.
I was prompted to flee the Northeast Asia neighborhood because it was the easiest thing in the world to discern that what we’re confronting — even if naturally-occurring and not tweaked further by human hand — nevertheless was something obtained/collected, analyzed, and then selected for further work/attention in the lab precisely for its hyper-transmissibility and lethality attributes. It was meant for deployment somewhere. (My contention is that it was intended for a certain non-Han-Chinese population in a certain northwestern province in the PRC.)
Of course, subsequent to that selection by the lab management, someone on the frontline research teams goofed and commuted home from the lab with the virus on her (apparently the intel suggests a “her”).
And eventually the CCP regime then had to deliberately start implementing strictures not only in the epicenter of the leak but nationwide — even at risk of trashing their own GDP. And the instant when I saw from Tokyo that this was what the PRC dictatorship was doing, I knew it was time to get out of Dodge. (I just wasn’t counting on Dodge following me across the Pacific…)
Unless and until there’s either a proven vaccine or a proven palliative or both, this thing will keep spreading and ravaging. This is not to excuse the Whitmers and Newsoms out there — quite the contrary — but rather to emphasize that status quo ante is not an option at this juncture.