Residing in the Covid-19 epicenter of Michigan is a sobering experience. Any hope, any faith in humanity I might have somehow stored up over the years of disappointment and revulsion have evaporated like a water stain on the concrete in summer. Even I, cynic that I am, never realized just how stupid, how arrogant, and how self-destructive most people are until I watched them ignore something as simple as social distancing on a daily basis.
From my vantage point, I can see two grocery stores, both of which are packed from the moment they open until they close two hours earlier than normal. How much panic buying can people do? More importantly, what the hell did they do with all the food and supplies they bought previously? Are we such a consumer culture that people can't conceive of actually holding onto the thigs they buy instead of consuming and going back for more? If you're wondering whether or not these simpletons are gloved and masked, while I don't have an actual scientific study to show you, my own observation is that maybe one out of four is masked and nobody is gloved. That means these panic shoppers are potentially shedding virus on a regular basis.
I guess that explains why, as of this writing, Michigan now has over 5,000 confirmed cases of Covid-19.
I have not stepped foot inside a building in over a week and have been home for over two weeks. When I went, I had no choice but to go because my wife's prescriptions needed to be picked up. This was at Walmart, where literally no one was social distancing, forcing me to jump, dodge and backwards run like an olympic athlete. Because of that brief excursion into virus hell, I am now in week two of hoping no symptoms manifest.
Let's not lay all of the blame on the customers, however. The stores should also be doing their part. They should agressively limit the duplicate items people can purchase as well as the amount of people who can enter the store at any given time. Time limits on shopping should also be imposed. Instead, I watch clumps of people at a store with a security guard enter and exit all the live-long day, often pausing to stand right next to one another.
So, I am lucky enough to have a grocery store right across from my house during an emergency but because of idiots shopping there and the greedy corporation running it, I can't step foot inside. Additionally, my attempts at ordering online for delivery have been stymied by an over-abundance of people using it and a possible workers strike based on complaints of the company not providing appropriate protections. An order I placed at a different store four days ago will hopefully arrive two days hence, while the order I placed with the store that is literally across the street cannot give me a delivery date. Under normal circumstances, this would be absurd, considering the delivery driver could literally walk across the street.
Clearly we're living in an insane time, a fact compounded by the way people are reacting. Americans are like children in so many ways. I've always said we're the adolescents of the international community, a young nation still trying to assert its uniqueness and not let the old farts tell us how to live our lives. To borrow an expression I detest, Americans are constantly saying, "Okay, boomer" to the rest of the planet.
What about Canada, you say? They're even younger. True. Canada is the mature, old-soul younger sibling who sees what the obnoxious know-it-all sibling does and goes the opposite way. It's why their prime minister delivers his virus updates alone and our president sits in a room full of sychophants, almost daring the virus to fuck with him. He's not alone either.
People on my Facebook page are posting images and videos of themselves visiting relatives...not just once, but often. I see children in my neighborhood playing with their neighbors. I hear and see morons comparing this pandemic to auto accidents and drawing false parrallels to the flu's death rate as if one can compare a brand new, incurable illness to one our bodies can actually fight. I've been called "melodramatic" by someone who knows better for writing that irresponsible memes claiming the things listed above will lead to deaths, because it will inspire the unintelligent to ignore safety protocols. And if that sounds like hysteria, take a look at the churches that have defied the "stay and shelter" rules and get back to me.
By the way, that isn't me calling churchgoers unintelligent. Millions of intelligent churchgoers are keeping their asses at home as they should. But it only takes a few people to spread a virus:
I don't know what's going to happen at this point. I know I haven't felt this level of anxiety since the threat of nuclear war loomed on the horizon before Gorbachev saved us all from that. Back then, we only had to worry about the idiots in government and a handful of jingoistic lunatics on both sides. Now, thanks to thirty-plus years of disinformation and a culture based damn near exclusively on consumption instead of production and invention, we have to worry about everybody doing exactly the wrong thing.
Dispatch Over~
Read previous Disptach here.
