It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. Publicly, the worst. Privately, sometimes the best. It was the time of Covid-19 and of goodness and nastiness.<\/p>\n
—–<\/p>\n
In a small dry-country town, a health club owner whose business was ordered closed for being \u201cnon-essential\u201d during the pandemic panic checked with the sheriff: Could she conduct exercise classes outdoors, with small groups, everyone staying six feet apart?<\/p>\n
Yes.<\/em><\/p>\n Midway through her first class, deputies of that very same sheriff arrive. A busybody has spotted the “deadly” and “illegal” activity and they’ve been dispatched to shut her down. Despite an appeal to both law and reason, she’s forced to end her classes.<\/p>\n The entire county has only a dozen cases of Covid-19 in its hundreds of mostly empty square miles.<\/p>\n —–<\/p>\n In the same dry-country town, the only supermarket for 25 miles has a cop stationed at the door. An employee, also stationed at the door, holds a container of disinfecting wipes.<\/p>\n The woman, wanting to take a cart and enter the store, asks for one of the wipes.<\/p>\n “The carts have already been wiped,” the cop barks.<\/p>\n “Yes, but I want to make sure, and I also want to use the wipe on my hands.”<\/p>\n Cop “allows” employee to give the woman a disinfectant sheet, which she uses on the cart, then on her hands and wrists.<\/p>\n She starts to enter the store. The cop blocks her.<\/p>\n “You have to use hand sanitizer if you want to go in,” he growls.<\/p>\n “But you just saw me use something better than hand sanitizer.”<\/p>\n “You want to go in the store, you use hand sanitizer. Don’t use it, can’t go in. Your choice.”<\/p>\n (Why is it so often governments tell us it’s “our choice” when it’s really only Hobson’s choice?)<\/p>\n —–<\/p>\n In a small wet-country town whose large, mostly empty county has, as yet, zero cases of Covid-19, the tiny hospital and the newly established virus testing station are having trouble getting personal protection equipment. The medical-supply networks are depleted.<\/p>\n A local critter doc, realizing she can purchase items through veterinary suppliers that aren’t available from human-medical channels, buys and donates face shields to the hospital and boxes of gloves to the testing station.<\/p>\n She also gifts a bag of specialty dog food to a client-friend when supplies dry up elsewhere. The friend in turn finds, buys, and gives to her an important supplement that’s been unavailable through Amazon or larger city stores — but happens to be in stock in the most unlikely place, the tiny town pharmacy.<\/p>\n When the doc comes out of her clinic to get the supplement, she’s wearing a colorful cloth mask. A client made a bunch of them and gave several to every clinic staffer.<\/p>\n Lessons not only in resourcefulness, but in the virology of kindness.<\/p>\n —–<\/p>\n In the same small wet-country town, neighbors plan an “illegal” event for the birthday of a bored, scared about-to-be 12-year-old. He hasn’t seen his friends in a month and the constant drumbeat of end-of-the-world news has him terrified. His parents understand full well that the economic shut-down is political and the epidemic nowhere near as catastrophic as the media loves to paint it, but he doen’t have enough life experience to get that. (How many millions of kids are being permanently scarred by endlessly hyped plague panic?)<\/p>\n So one neighbor concocts an adventure — a neighborhood-wide scavenger hunt followed by an outdoor pizza party — and enlists multiple co-conspirators. Even those neighbors not participating, and not in the know about the event, observe the activity up and down the street — and not one calls the cops.<\/p>\n On the contrary, during the hunt, neighbors who seldom speak to each other (and one who usually avoids speaking to anybody) meet and talk.<\/p>\n And the neighborhood’s longest (and oldest) resident, who in some other places might resent all the newcomers and worry about them bringing plague onto her property, donates both prizes and hiding places on her large lot and observes, “You know, this is the absolutely perfect neighborhood.”<\/p>\n —–<\/p>\n Despite the title of this post, this is not about places — not towns, nor cities, nor states, nor countries. I just happen to be reading Dickens and just happen to have nothing but bad (authoritarian) news relayed from the dry-country town and nothing but good news from the wet country.<\/p>\n No doubt in both towns there are people quietly doing noble deeds and others quietly, or ostentatiously, being authoritarian and stupid. (And isn’t it interesting how often authoritarian and stupid go together — as in the case of that lone paddleboarder in California<\/a>, dragged out of the empty ocean by Authoritah so he could be exposed to more people and they to him?)<\/p>\n This is about individuals, their character, and the choices they make under stress. Isn’t it always?<\/p>\n It’s also about individuals acting on their own vs government and the kind of people who love to use government to enforce their own agendas.<\/p>\n