What's Next

About a year ago, press conferences and news reports were grabbing everyone’s attention.

Politicians and health experts were lining up to explain a crisis. A new virus was detected. It was quickly defined as contagious and deadly. It was also defined as preventable by washing your hands, covering your mouth when coughing or sneezing and stay home when sick. The advice was simple. Remember what you were taught in kindergarten and you will be fine.

As time moved on, so did the restrictions. It became politically incorrect to call it a Chinese virus, even though it was first identified in China. And yes, there were reports of people using the virus as an excuse to display racial bias against people of Asian descent.

Along the way, many questions were left unanswered from the national level down. Worse yet, this has become the golden idol in a sense. There is an implied script that must be followed. Ask questions, but when the appointed person answers, that person’s response is absolute truth (as redundant as the statement is. Truth is truth and truth cannot deny truth.). Anyone who questions the response is viewed with the shock of watching the one human with enough brass to smack God himself.

A point to consider: doesn’t it seem odd that businesses are limited, or worse, and then when the workers, the people hustling to pay their rent and mortgage, the government debates how much to give them? Doesn’t it seem like the response is out of balance? Take care of the sick people, but don’t make people sick. Don’t assume people are sick, unless that is an individual’s best response in regard to his or her personal health.

This virus is more deadly to some than to others; the same as with pneumonia, the flu, strep, a bad cold… The list goes on. It doesn’t take a medical professional to understand that. Some people have internal challenges even they don’t know about until a new player enters the environment. Do my health challenges mean someone else has to close or limit their business? Or for that matter, anyone else?

Many people accuse this COVID crusade of being a power play, a step at unveiling a socialist conversion of the U.S. I often laugh at the comments highlighting the person complaining about capitalism while checking social media on the latest smart phone costing more than his/her parent’s first car and drinking a $6 coffee drink. Is it socialism, or is it more of an oligarchy, a system where the real power and decisions belong to a few? Believe it or not, the American form of government was designed to keep the oligarchs at bay. But it only works if people stay involved in the system. It isn’t easy, and sometimes it is abrasive, especially when confronting people who have developed a way to benefit by the system.

So now that we’re in 2021, stay home and take care of yourself when you’re sick. Follow an alternate work schedule if you can. And above all, be one that doesn’t let the nation’s political system catch an incurable virus.

We are still in an environment where fear can win, if we let it. Make the choice to live each day deliberately as Henry David Thoreau would say, regardless if you have a day or a century of life to enjoy.