Bored with social distancing? Those without masks, rubbing shoulders with each other outside state capitols and demanding a swift reopening of the economy, might answer that they’re bored to death. One hopes that isn’t literally true, but their gatherings do make infection more likely.
Acknowledging that some protesters are reckless is not to say they are wrong. Governors such as Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer have been capricious, banning harmless activities such as the purchase of seeds to plant in the garden. (In the Left’s telling, naturally, it is President Trump who is the authoritarian.)
Conspiracy theories about the pandemic being an elite hoax to damage Trump are bunk. But protesters and those two-thirds of workers who cannot do their jobs from the safety of their homes are right to be anxious about the economic devastation being wrought by shelter-in-place orders. They are right, too, to be angry that some of it is unnecessary.
They sense an additional danger — that of mission creep — in government-imposed restrictions. We all agreed to turn ourselves into hermits temporarily to “flatten the curve,” which meant slowing infection so the healthcare system could cope. This must not be allowed to mutate into the idea that we can make ourselves entirely safe.
Even with social distancing measures in place after the economy “opens up,” it needs to be understood and accepted that thousands of people in the country will catch COVID-19 and die. I say that as someone who, at 63 years old, cannot be accused of a selfish presumption of personal resistance to the disease.
It is time to resume commercial activity, at first gradually, and then as quickly as reasonably possible. If we allow ourselves to be frightened into an innumerate expectation of complete safety before life is allowed to return nearer to normal, we will bring on an economic, social, and national catastrophe involving the destruction of America’s wealth, happiness, and place in the world. We must take sensible precautions so the public knows the balance of risk has switched toward activity away from inertia. But a balance still means risk on each side.
You can feel patience draining away over the little inconveniences of extreme social distancing. Most people probably enjoyed the novelty of virtual happy hours, drinking with friends at opposite ends of an internet link. But we humans are social creatures, and virtual companionship is not enough. We need real social contact, not an imitation.
I’ve been to two small parties in the past week with people who’d had as much isolation as they were prepared to endure. No one touched anyone else’s glass, we shared no serving utensils, and we stayed 6 feet apart. It would be feeble to say we couldn’t bear being sequestered any longer, but the balance between the danger of contagion and the balm of careful social interaction had tipped and changed our behavior.
Staying at home for several days, or a week or two, is obviously fine, but eventually it starts to feel like house arrest. Any prison is irksome, not just because it is limiting but also because the limitations are imposed not entirely voluntary. Part of being fully human, certainly of being fully American, is that we want to decide how we live our lives. Freedom makes us who we are.
I visited the Soviet Union in 1986. A bleakness overlay everything, and it was due not just to material want, to store shelves empty except for a few dead flies, or to the horror of cuisine at what was supposed to be Moscow’s best hotel. It was a deeper, internalized dreariness, a dead spirit, a general disengagement rooted in lack of freedom.
There were lighter moments on that trip, as there are with today’s pandemic incarceration. I recall listening glumly to a bureaucrat reeling off bogus statistics to a group of journalists. She knew we knew she was lying, but it was her job. We drifted into stupefied acquiescence, for which coffee was no relief. “No, thank you,” one reporter said as his chin sank toward his chest, “It’d keep me awake.” Even the bureaucrat laughed, relieved that something true and unpredictable had broken the numbing pointlessness of the day.
I recall this story not to suggest social distancing is as grim as life under totalitarianism, but because it points to the way the spirit wilts in people locked down and constrained. It is a corrosive way of life. America’s return to normal will be piecemeal. Some will tolerate, or require, more social distancing than others. But the deep freeze has started to thaw. It certainly should.
