We are waiting for the results of the national biopsy. It’s impossible to concentrate long enough to tackle a hard book or a complicated task. It’s a time for organizing drawers, cleaning closets, and if the rain would stop, raking leaves. The leaves on the maples and some of the oaks have been programmed, I’ve noticed, to fall about an hour after city leaf collection crews make their fall pass down our street.
WHUMP!
Is that the wind, or are the trees giggling? Much work lies ahead.
To paraphrase our president, the news is “COVID, COVID, COVID, Trump, Trump, Trump.” Both are words I hope will “disappear like magic” once election results are in, whenever that might be. Back to normal, however, according to actual experts not quacks, is probably, even with an effective vaccine, a full year away. The pandemic’s restrictions, limitations, uncertainty, and isolation are unsettling and difficult, but are they hard? For many, yes. For others, maybe not as much as they think.
John McCain’s 5½ years of torture and imprisonment in a North Vietnamese prison was hard. Nelson Mandela’s 27 years in prison was hard. McCain went on to become a U.S. senator, presidential candidate, and hero to millions. Mandela became the first truly democratically elected president of South Africa.
True as those facts are, I understand that they are poor comfort to those suffering loss of livelihood or loved ones. I am reminded of an in-class lesson taught by my high school physics teacher, who said that he was once hospitalized with a broken leg in the days before modern painkillers. When he complained, he said, a nurse told him to think himself lucky. The guy in the next bed had two broken legs. “That knowledge didn’t make my leg hurt any less,” he told us. That statement strikes me as true of the pain inflicted so disproportionately by this pandemic. People are hurting.
As I write the number of COVID-19 cases globally and in the U.S. is rising dangerously. That suggests that winter may be grim indeed. In some states hospitals are nearly overwhelmed. New Hampshire has fared better than most states, as has, after the initial virus explosion, New England. If it stays that way, and as an at-risk elder, I deeply hope that it does, historians and epidemiologists may figure out why.
I think that New England’s status as the most highly educated corner of the country helps. Most New Englanders don’t believe that science is a communist plot. I think New England’s, and especially New Hampshire’s, tradition of town meetings and citizen democracy plays a role. Local issues can make allies of people with different political beliefs and when needs arise or disaster occurs, prove that people of different political persuasions may be among the first in line to provide comfort and help.
Like I said, that’s what I hope. But I watched as at least half of the customers entering a popular lunchtime venue in a red town near Concord last week were maskless and some, from their glare at my masked face, proudly and defiantly so. That does not bode well for winter.
Gov. Chris Sununu has done a far better job than most in leadership roles in his party to communicate clearly and keep the state’s residents safe. The next month or so will test his leadership again. At least two Concord restaurants have been visited by COVID-positive patrons and the outdoor dining season, for snow-plowing reasons if nothing else, is coming to an end. Sununu has been unwilling to mandate mask wearing and though Concord, like some other communities, mandates masks, the mandate is unenforced and ignored, even in some cases by store owners.
The state’s epidemiologist, Dr. Benjamin Chan, when asked by New Hampshire Public Radio host Laura Knoy to discuss the issue earlier this week, ducked, dodged, hemmed and hawed, and when finally forced to say the word “mandate” sounded like a man made to chew rocks.
For now, as life moves indoors and distancing becomes more difficult, a mask mandate is the best we’ve got. Of course it can’t and won’t be enforced, save perhaps in the most egregious cases. But it’s the message that the governor and Dr. Chan need to send.
(Ralph Jimenez of Concord is a member of the Monitor’s editorial board.)