I was in Whole Foods in Boston today, and you’d think being in a (sort of) cool grocery store in a liberal city in a liberal state that everyone would wear masks and social distance. Whole Foods is one of those places that requires everyone to social distance while standing in line to get in, and to wear a mask.
So far so good, but when I was shopping today, I was picking up wine in the wine aisle. A woman came down the aisle (too narrow for social distancing). She didn’t appear to see me or pay attention to me and kept coming toward me. I turned to her, put my hands on my hips and waited for her to notice me and stop. She never did. I walked to the end of the aisle away from her and waited. She dawdled in front of the wine, then walked away in the opposite direction.
Same thing when I was picking up yogurt, standing in front of the selection. Another woman was pushing her cart toward me, looking at the yogurt and not slowing down. I tried getting her attention but eventually had to back up to let her do her shopping.
This kept happening; at the fish counter a man came up right behind me; I moved away. He had a face mask but it was down off his nose and barely covering his mouth.
What’s going on? People were not only not social distancing (if we have to social distance outside, doing it inside is even more important); they were oblivious to others.
Have we all sort of submerged into our own worlds in which no one else really exists outside us? Is this the Trump Effect—not just refusing to wear masks and social distance, but more importantly, assuming no one else exists on the planet but us?
Do we blame this on computers? Or is it that the virus is so inward-forcing of us, quarantined at home, distant, that we have sort of fallen into a stupor of forgetting there exist other people on the planet? Of course, we know they do, intellectually. But emotionally—which is to say how we behave physically—I wonder if we have forgotten each other.
What emerges from this is a consideration of one of the gifts of the virus, as painful and destructive as it’s been: that is to remember that we must be connected; we are all connected. If you, Mr. Republican white male gun owner in Florida, get the virus, I’m going to get it. And vice versa. Dr. Fauci said the country is not going to get beyond or out of the virus in a piecemeal fashion, one state at a time. It’s either all of us or none of us.
Right now Mass. is doing fairly well, after a long spring of being third in the nation for hot spots of infections and deaths. Now our reinfection rate is below 1, which is the key to stopping the virus from spreading. But how long will that last if Florida, Texas, Oklahoma, California, even Wyoming are reporting huge increases?
What’s being forced on us quite literally with this virus is the need to see ourselves as all connected. BLM is one more centrally important aspect of this. We’re either going to get through this together, connected, or:
We’re not going to get through this.
So, it’s as easy as asking yourself: Would you like to move forward or stay in place?