Almost 12 months ago, when I flipped the calendar to 2020, I had visions of getting better at what I do, finding time for some things I don’t do enough and, as I told a friend as a goal or resolution, ride more. I saw myself retracing the Tour de Nebraska ride through the Panhandle. I saw myself doing a few more weekenders, seeing people I miss and scheduling excuses to let the mind and body relax.
Instead, I like most of us, spent the year moving from thinking I was a normal hard-working guy to hearing people say “normal” was never that good.
Prior to 2020 people didn’t think twice of about it. You didn’t question if you were sick unless you first showed some kind of symptoms. On occasion, a shopper would see someone with a mask. The curious might internally ask “I wonder what’s wrong,” but seldom make an issue of it. Now, there are places where a shopper is called out for not wearing a mask or something.
I remember the press conferences early this year announcing a global pandemic and thinking I was watching a movie. “No Way! I just saw that on a movie. This can’t be happening.” The storyline referenced involves some lab where by clumsiness or design a virus is released, causing increasing panic, humanity turned into madmen and forcing people to stay in their homes with the doors and windows boarded up. Fortunately, much of the fiction remains on reality’s cutting room floor.
According to the Centers for Disease Control, COVID-19 is caused by a new coronavirus first identified in Wuhan, China in December, of 2019. Theories started rising on how it happened and what to do to stop it or slow it. There was everything from wash your hands and cover your mouth to hide in the basement like an actor in a cheap apocalyptic movie. The awkward part is many of those movies have people in their cellars until they either run out of supplies or become the next case study for cabin fever. In some scenarios, characters have said they would rather take their chance outside than live a depressed existence inside.
What has surprised me most is how abrasive people could be. We are expected, by the populous, to follow directives without question, yet on the other front every person appointed to apply the law is under constant review. This is a new set of rules in a sense. There are places in this nation where people have been cited for having church services outside and in separate cars, where people are required to not be in public without a mask. The implication at least is to wear a mask even if you’re alone on an empty sidewalk, or hiking through the forest. There are governors who have banned public assembly and then get caught attending family gatherings, fitness clubs and bars. And then there are when asked will quietly admit we are watching the greatest and easiest weapon: fear.
I find it almost humorous that COVID prevention could be traced back to our elementary classrooms, and rightly so. Children are taught the social graces of cover your mouth when coughing and sneezing, wipe your nose with a tissue, then throw it away. Wash your hands when done in the bathroom, and before eating.
Adults are told to stay home when they’re sick, although between an excessive work ethic and workplace expectation that doesn’t always happen. Franklin D. Roosevelt, the 32nd president of the U.S., said in his first inaugural address “So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is... fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”
Either Roosevelt was a salesman or our values have drastically changed. Too often I have found myself in arguments with people I thought were friends, and they have become people who acted as if they wanted to live in a world of fear. Where did that come from? When did we reach a point of wanting the government we criticize do more for us, which means we have less to do for ourselves?
I consider the impact of perpetuated fear and recall the history lessons, chapters in the Nation’s past that would have stayed there if people had been afraid of what might have happened. This chapter in society has the odd factor of no real end in sight, which multiplies the fear. Maybe what we need is to get back in balance, sit high in the saddle knowing the day might change at a moment’s notice, but that’s ok. That’s life.
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