It’s the twenty fourth day safe at home. Tonight begins Passover, Sunday is Easter and the beginning of Eastern Orthodox Holy Week. What is normally a solemn few weeks is made even more so by the pandemic.
Today was the single most deadly day in New York and New Jersey. More than 1,000 people lost their lives to corona. In the tri-state area, though, more people are being released from the hospital than are being admitted. Fewer new cases are being identified. This is the other side of that coin. What we are doing is working; we are starving the virus of hosts and must continue to do so. New Jersey’s shelter in place has been extended another month, as the state officials believe we are still in the danger zone and fear that relaxing will incur exponential flare up. It will be June before we are able to have some semblance of normalcy in our lives.
I read something today that made me stop: there is so much noise around being productive and taking this time to learn something new, brush up on marketable skills, create and create more. It puts undue pressure on the parent trying to homeschool (let alone the single parent), the person battling anxiety and depression, the person trying to hold together their financial situation. The suggestion: How about we give people grace and allow everyone to feel accomplished for making it through another day? How about we grant one another some slack – and props – for having survived another day of whatever it is we have to deal with.
A common theme for me these days is how fortunate many of us are compared to so many of our fellow citizens: we have a roof over our heads, we are working from home, there is food on the table, we have internet access so the kids can continue to be educated, we can comfort one another via video conference. How about the 10 million people who have applied for unemployment insurance in the last 3 weeks? How about the undocumented who cannot work their cash-pay jobs because they are all closed and cannot claim any benefits? How about the kids whose family cannot afford high speed internet and can’t go to the library to use those computers because it is closed?
Dr. Fauci took the opportunity to address the racial and social disparities that this pandemic is exposing but Andrew Cuomo took Fauci’s call for investigation one step further – and the step that Dr. Fauci did not – it’s about poverty. It’s about the racial inequalities that dictate the persistence of poverty in America and show up in the relative health of its citizens; the survival rate of its citizens.
I hope that the post-pandemic America will seek to eradicate the single most defining feature of our society – poverty, and all that is wrapped up in that – so that every citizen has a fighting chance. Every. Single. Citizen.