As a fairly introverted person I can’t say I’ve found the whole social-distancing thing particularly difficult. We’ve been joined by our youngest daughter (a grad student) and her significant other here in Montana, pleasant company, and it’s still possible to speak regularly with neighbors. Socially, I’m operating above my normal, acceptable threshold. Operating various dogs that used to come by on walks with owner/neighbors have suddenly become off limits for petting–all a part of social distancing but a surprise to them and a (small) hardship for me. Our yard is large and there are trails all around us here in Missoula so we’re spared any strong sense of being pent up and confined as must surely be the case with many apartment dwellers in large cities. It’s odd, though, as the days roll by with sunshine, the full arrival of Spring, and a seeming “normalcy” except for quieter streets and sidewalks not to occasionally be struck hard with a sense that some dark beast is silently slouching our way–that this seeming normalcy is utterly superficial and spurious, a fool’s paradise, and that all over the country and around the world something truly dark and terrible is occurring. Like 80-plus thousand lives lost in the country with a tally that’s still rising sharply–in a land where it’s increasingly become de rigueur for our feckless, sociopathic, and malignantly narcissistic leader’s base to pooh-pooh the pandemic as an overblown hoax and common-sense containment measures as intolerable acts of oppression.

As a 67-year old male with diabetes, it would seem I fit at least three diagnostic criteria for high-risk from this thing, despite generally good health. My wife has respiratory problems, so there’s risk for her, too. The upshot is that although our state, Montana, has the fewest cases in the country and various lock-down rules are presently being lifted (with considerably more justification here than in a number of other, invariably Republican majority, states), this fact and this lifting of restrictions don’t really have much of an effect on us. We’ll need to continue as we have, we suspect, for a long time still–until (hopefully) effective vaccines are developed and treatment regimens undergo considerably more refinement that is presently the case. This means minimizing outside contacts and trips for groceries or any other purchases, being careful with mail or packages, forgetting about the customary surge of summer visitors, staying out of restaurants (a vice of ours), and washing the hell out of or sequestering for three or four days anything brought from the outside world into the house. It’s all a bit of a pain; the object is to buy time and avoid coming down with this thing until vaccinations/immunity are available, or at least until treatment regimens are far more effectively calibrated than at present. Our odds of avoiding the disease given the state we live in and our adoption of such measures, at least into the immediate future, are pretty good. But there are no guarantees and it would seem our country’s overall response is likely to be damned feckless–politicized, ill-informed, and deadly. If it’s going to continue like this for a year or more, the risks are obviously compounded. So we’ll likely be living with an irksome but necessary paranoia, with a Damoclean sword hanging over us, for a good long while. It’s a sobering thing. And we’ll be constantly, discomfitingly aware of the risks every single loved one and every single acquaintance, and everyone else it would seem in the whole world, now faces.

[submitted on 5/13/2020]