The new normal may be new, but it certainly isn’t normal. We are over a year and a half into this pandemic. Friends have gotten sick. Friends have died. Sally and I are very lucky. We have worked throughout this stretch. Our lives have hardly been disrupted, yet we have been impacted.
Sally works in the mall. She has had a lot of interaction with customers and coworkers. I am used to having 90% of my business conducted in-person in my office. COVID has reduced that to about 40% last fall before returning, post vaccine, to closer to 75%. But our home has been altogether different. In the last eighteen months we have had three friends, two workmen, and one of the kids step foot in our condo. Six people. That’s it.
We had a friend over last month. It could not have been more awkward. It wasn’t our fault. It certainly wasn’t hers. It just seemed odd to have someone here.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve walked out the door and wondered what was missing once we allowed to keep our masks at home. I don’t want to wear a mask again, ever, but I find myself reaching for one before I enter a store. The moment it was posted that the fully vaccinated didn’t have to wear a mask, no one, not the vaccinated and certainly not the unvaccinated, bothered to cover their faces. It is hard to walk through the grocery store and not wonder who is vaccinated and who just doesn’t give a damn about his fellow human beings. And that is the start down a very negative path.
Beware of darkness. There is so much negativity. The news is painfully negative, regardless of your preferred station. One side is pushing the dangers of inflation as if no one remembers Jerry Ford mailing out Whip Inflation Now buttons or how the last five years may have gotten us to this point. The other side was so focused on the previous administration that they seem confused now that he is gone. They don’t want him back, really, January 6th was the last straw, but they seem at times lost. And COVID, specifically the Delta variant, looms over all of us. It can all be quite depressing. Don’t let it bring you down.
You can’t ignore COVID anymore than you can ignore the hurricane about to strike New England or the inevitable disaster that is Afghanistan. Pretending tragedies, natural or man-made, don’t exist doesn’t make them go away. The answer is to do what you can do to alleviate the impact of these problems and to not make things worse. Per COVID, wear a mask when asked and get fully vaccinated. And for all of the rest, we just have to stay in the present tense.
Dave
Picture – Find The Light – David L Cunix