God Will Save Me

Or not.

Someday I hope to write coherently about the dreamy sort of half-life we’ve been living in my house since the middle of October. I feel stuck in one of those strange dreams that isn’t quite a nightmare but is very unsettling because everything is familiar but nothing makes sense. But that won’t be today: my brain is still not working well enough to put my thoughts on that into words.

Instead, I’ve been thinking today about the ways this country responded to Covid-19, what it says about us, and how it’s the most fitting capstone to these wretched five years. Recently, I’ve been contacted by a number of local people who’ve all told me about bad experiences in their workplaces. For their own protection, I’ll keep their names and places of work private for now. There are two businesses I’ve heard about who refuse to let their employees call out sick or quarantine when a family member tests positive. In fact, one workplace is accused of firing people who call out sick, even when they have doctor’s notes. Arkansas is a right-to-work state, and therefore many people believe that bosses can fire them for whatever reason. But no one can be fired for a reason prohibited by federal or state law, and there are a number of protections in place meant to help people who are sick with Covid keep their jobs. That does little good unless you have the resources and the knowledge to challenge your firing.

There is a smaller, subtler way that workplaces are shifting the burdens of the pandemic onto employees. Small establishments, like some local restaurants, are flouting guidelines about the limits on patrons, or forcing workers to work sick, or having staff meetings during which people don’t wear masks. Most commonly, they’re not enforcing the state’s mask mandate, which means their employees serve customers who aren’t covering their faces and could be exposing them to coronavirus. While I’ve seen people wearing masks in places that enforce their mandates, like Wal-Mart, I’ve been to many other establishments where no one wears a mask.

For me, whether to go in is a choice. But for the people who work there, who are no longer receiving support from the government otherwise, whether to work is not a choice. The general community response to people who object to others’ not wearing a mask is “If you’re scared, stay home.” There’s also still a lot of confusion: people seem to respond as if the issue is whether the individual is themselves sick or trying to protect themselves from illness, but actually, all of these actions are about trying to stop the spread from people who may or may not know they have it. We are supposed to stay home when we might be sick to protect our most vulnerable citizens. That’s not how it’s being framed. In a Facebook post about a local fast food establishment where a manager was continuing to come to work despite his wife and child testing positive, someone responded: “As truck drivers we have no choice, you must move freight unless your truly sick! [sic] We have a saying at DSI suck it up buttercup, lol.” What she’s advocating, perhaps without knowing it, is a situation in which a truck driver could be spreading Covid all along their route.

Even our county judge, Dale James, counseled residents that wearing a mask was a personal choice in a mid-November update, as our case numbers began to rise.

What all of these attitudes do is shift the responsibility of the pandemic away from the collective and onto the individual. If someone gets sick, they have no one to blame but themselves. Death, then, is a sad consequence of their own actions, not the actions of other people. Or if someone loses their job, or has health consequences for the rest of their lives. I can understand the psychic appeal of this, but of course it’s wrong. These demands for the primacy of personal freedom and responsibility on the one hand, and civility no matter what happens on the other, are also abusive in their own way. I can refuse to wear a mask and potentially expose you to a virus, but you have to still be nice to me and be my friend. Trump supporters would also like to not be held responsible for the policy consequences of their vote. It’s an attitude that tries to file electoral politics into some special category that carries no civic weight, as if politics weren’t just the term we use for the most basic way we’ve decided to get along with the people we live in the same place with.

This disaster requires all of us to act together, and, like any group project, its easily thwarted by even a minority of people, 20 or 30 percent, who refuse to participate. In the workplace examples, individual workers are accused of having a fear, perhaps even an irrational one, of getting sick and not wanting to work through it. Someone who is too frightened to work or go to a meeting is more easily fired. It creates a disincentive to do the right thing.

Since Thanksgiving, our local caseload has roughly tripled, from around 50-60 cases to, at the moment, 163. The number of deaths was stuck at 3 from March until this fall, when they began rising again, and are now at 6. Of course, there’s a lag in the data: new cases now are hospitalizations in a week or two, and hospitalizations later become deaths. Some amount of future suffering is baked in. What people are doing in response to this is praying. That’s fine and welcome I’m sure, but they could also have worn masks, forgone Thanksgiving, and stopped going out to restaurants with family. They could have shuttered their businesses, given their employees time off, and pressured their governments to help people through the lean economic times that resulted from the lockdowns. It reminds me of an allegory we heard often growing up here. I haven’t been able to find who wrote it. It is sometimes called “God Will Save Me,” and sometimes called “The Drowning Man.” It’s about a terrible flood forecast in a town. One man refuses to evacuate, insisting, “God Will Save Me.” He turns down every rescue attempt that follows as the floodwaters rise, insisting the same thing each time. He drowns.

When in Heaven, the man stood before God and asked, “I put all of my faith in You. Why didn’t You come and save me?”

And God said, “Son, I sent you a warning. I sent you a car. I sent you a canoe. I sent you a motorboat. I sent you a helicopter. What more were you looking for?”

It’s astounding to me that so many of those who I grew up with ignored that lesson. Of course, in the Covid example, we ought to be trying to save other people. Perhaps they think God will save them. For those who don’t live, maybe it was just their time. When it’s my time it’s my time. It’s in God’s hands. This extreme anti-communitarianism, in which everyone is out for themselves all the time, and there’s no such thing as a public good or a public will, has been a hallmark of the Trump era. We’d been building to it for my entire life, and it’s part of our political philosophy now. Trump’s gutting of the federal government and radical incompetence has brought it to its clearest and truest expression.

Thank You…

For reading this year and for subscribing. I hope to have more news in the New Year. In the meantime, I hope you’re all giving yourselves rest and love. We will look back in the not-to-distance future and recognize this as one of the most challenging years of our lives, I think. I hope we find a way to mourn together and move on.

What I’m Reading:

I haven’t read much this year because I’ve been writing, but when I’m driving, cleaning, or especially when I’ve been sick, I’ve been listening to the Hercule Poirot series on Libby. These books are almost always available at your local library, and they’re read by fantastic actors: David Suchet, Hugh Frazer, Dan Stevens, and Anna Massey, just to name a few. I love old mysteries, as problematic as they can be, and I love the concise simplicity of their narrative.

Cute Animal Pic of the Week:

This is Ralphie. Someone contacted me a few weeks ago and said they’d found a sick puppy in their yard. They worried he had parvo. He did not have parvo, or anything else the vet tested for. He got better quickly though and is now being fostered in NYC. Happy Christmas, Ralphie.