Day 57

It’s been two months of quarantining in New York and, until recently, also around most of the rest of the country. No one was excited about this prospect. No one thought, gee whizz, this is great! I get to stay indoors indefinitely as the spring weather gets more and more beautiful? And likely most of the summer too? Amazing! Oh, and all of my favorite places to go will be abandoned perhaps never to be restored to their former wonderfulness again? Neat. And, also?! I won’t be able to see my friends and family for, woo, like who knows how long? I love it!

What America was uniquely socially and culturally unprepared for was a monumental national challenge, a big existential question that we could all answer together—like do we let a bunch of people die or do we fuck our economy? Hm, that’s a real noodle twister!

The great federalist experiment that is our country finds such choices toxic so after an imperfect, incomplete 4-8 week lockdown (depending where you are), now we’re doing a little bit from column A and a little bit from column B, which will probably result in a bunch of people dying and also a fucked economy. America! We like to have it both ways! When you have 50 different laboratories experimenting with how to handle the ongoing coronavirus crisis and the compounding economic crisis, well, folks, we are going to get some mixed results at best.

We locked down in part to spare the healthcare system the nightmares that Italy and China endured. Did we succeed? In many places and cases, yes, we did. Go, team! In achieving (sort of, for the moment) that goal, we also protected unknowable numbers of people from getting sick and dying. Also excellent! Now that we almost, kind of have a limp, slippery—nigh unholdable—handle on the spread of the virus (for a hot minute), are we prepared for what comes next? Are we ready for the inevitable next wave? Have we solved our supply chain issues? Have we ramped up testing to a useful level? Have we found a way to reliably find out who’s had it and who hasn’t and where they are? Have we started building the army of contact tracers to help track down people who were exposed and tuck them into their homes for the requisite two-week quarantine? Have we somehow lucked into more competent federal leadership? Or, at least, has our federal leadership finally truly grasped the magnitude of the challenges to be met and responded accordingly?

Nope!

On the contrary, the President seems to have decided this is all too hard, thrown his wee hands in the air and declared the virus defeated—even as cases spike anew in many states. He’s even gone so far as to block the release of CDC guidelines for reopening localities because the guidance was too strict. But it’s not just the administration; it seems that a lot of us took the annoyance, inconvenience and economic devastation of the lockdown as the first item on the “Get Rid of Covid-19” to-do list, checked it off because we got tired of looking at, and now we are to tra-la-la our way into a very uncertain future. I look out the literal windows of my apartment and the more figurative windows of the internet and conversations with my friends in different states and it’s undeniable: America is understandably done with this bullshit. But, America, this bullshit is not done with us. While everyone I speak to personally is still diligently quarantined, isolated, masked and at least six feet away from other humans, there is a growing number of people who have clearly decided to say fuck it.

These people come in a lot of different forms. They are blithe park-goers in New York City, having an al fresco picnic brunch with far too many people in a park that is bursting, social distance impossible. They are the knots of people standing on street corners in my neighborhood, masks around their chins as they smoke cigarettes and chat with their buddies who are decidedly much closer than six feet away. They are the maskless joggers that don’t even try to get off the sidewalk or move away from people when they run by. (Full disclosure: I run three to four times a week. I wear a mask as long as I can stand it and always if I can’t put at least 8-10 feet between me and anyone I may pass. I also mostly run in the middle of the street, away from other pedestrians. Anyone who chooses to lecture me on how running is bad will be ignored. It is one of my few hooks into sanity and I will continue as long as my knees hold out.)

But then there’s those other dipshits who feel the collaborative measures we’ve taken to protect the health and safety of our fellow citizens are an abuse of their god-given rights and liberties as Americans, or think the lockdown is a Democratic ploy to wreck the economy to make Trump lose the election (I mean, brilliant idea; what could possibly go wrong?), or they believe it’s a manufactured crisis and no one is really dying and all the doctors, scientists, politicians and media who tell them otherwise are just Deep State Hillary loyalists bent on destroying Trump/democracy/America and they choose to air their grievances with large weapons, poorly spelled protest signs, and gargantuan and delusional senses of entitlement while gathering in ill-advised crowds. They just want to go to Applebees. Is that so wrong?

At this point, I would be completely stoked for a night out at Applebees. Hell, I’d put on heels and makeup, I’d order one of everything and get wildly drunk on whatever signature cocktail Applebees has to offer. I am as desperate as the next person to return to our old lives where we got to go get haircuts and eat food we didn’t cook in places that aren’t our house. To go to work without worrying about getting sick or getting other people sick with a damn scary virus. To hug our friends and fly to fun places or just leave the house without suffocating and sweating behind a mask. It appalls me that those assholes think they are alone in hating this whole situation. We all hate it. We are all yearning for it to be over. But it’s not over, not nearly.

As appalled as I am by these people, a deafening minority may they technically be, I understand that it’s not just about getting your roots dyed or going to the beach or being made to wear a mask. It’s about earning a living. For a staggering portion of the country, if things are not yet dire, they are damn close. For others, dire has come and gone and desperate has settled in. I know a lot of people protesting the lockdowns are just focused on their own survival, their own sense of security. In every-person-for-themselves America, this is what people do. I’m not saying I think it’s the right way, I’m just saying that I can understand where they’re coming from, even if I disagree with where they get to.

But you know what? A lot of them are assholes who just don’t wanna do it anymore. It’s hard. And boring. They’re sick and tired of being made to give a shit about people other than themselves—people they don’t even know! And I count among the assholes those who have every privilege of a steady income and a comfy home who are just so damn annoyed that they can’t do stuff right now that they’re saying, out loud, that they’re cool losing a few grandmas and grandpas and some of those resource-leeching sick people here and there if it means they can take their brats to Disneyland and go out to restaurants and take that summer vacation to wherever after all. Fuck those people.

Trust me when I tell you, “fuck it” is among my very favorite phrases and sentiments. I love nothing more than saying, Fuck it! I’m gonna have a third martini! Or, Fuck it! Let’s go eat some cheeseburgers! Or, Fuck it! I’m taking Friday off for the hell of it. “Fuck it!” is the great mantra of tossing caution to the wind, of putting all your self-discipline and good behavior on hold and letting rip for a while. It’s a great thing to do during regular times. But these are not regular times. These days the “fuck it’s” are more like, “Fuck it! Let’s order delivery, I’m sick of cooking,” or, “Fuck it! Why not sleep as late as possible and shorten the fucking day.”

But big swaths of the country are saying, “Fuck it! How bad can it be? Let’s get back out there!” And I get it, I really, really do. I can’t tell you how much I wish this were a “fuck it” moment. But it’s not. It’s really, really not.

The greatest hope going into this was that if we, collectively, had the discipline to lockdown, to learn to live with the various privations great and small for a few months, we would be able to get a solid foothold to push ourselves back up in a safe and ordered way. Yes, it would be painful. Yes, there would be untold collateral damage beyond the calamity caused by the virus. But if we did it right, we could come to see the temporary pain of the shutdown as a necessary preamble to an organized, successful recovery that could quickly gain momentum and get us to the other side intact, if forever changed.

Instead, we are trading that in for a hodgepodge approach that will ensure that we will have rolling spikes of infection rates that will likely keep hospitals struggling to keep up (and struggling to pay their bills and their payrolls), and increasing death rates—all of this and a slag heap of an economy that will barely sputter to a sluggish amble before new lockdowns will be needed when the second wave comes, which will devastate people and communities afresh, erasing any meager gains a reopening may have yielded. Or, even if there are no new lockdowns in light of a resurgence, it’s not like consumer confidence is exactly going to go up anytime soon, hence all open businesses will be playing to a largely absent customer base. So, all that considered, it doesn’t seem likely that the economy will be “rocking” by July or even September. I really hope I’m wrong about this. But it seems to me we’ve been staggering down the wrong path since the beginning and now that we’re good and lost in the jungle of confusion, mismanagement and bad decisions, we’ve discovered we don’t even have a machete.

We had our chance to do it right the first time in order to better handle the inevitable resurgence of the virus. We whiffed it—for a lot of reasons, in a lot of ways, of which I’m sure we’re all painfully aware.

That said, I believe that New York and some other states are doing it as right as they can all things considered. And people living in those states will both suffer and benefit from the various consequences of each state-government’s actions. And the citizens of the states that are reopening will do the same. The great experiment of America continues, and we are all the lab rats.

Illustration by Anthony Picone, @stillasleep13 on Instagram