COVID-19 Outbreak (Update: More than 2.9M cases and 132,313 deaths in US)
We’ll be ready to re-open when bus drivers can tell riders to wear a mask and not get spit upon.
We’ll be ready when McDonalds workers can say the dining room is closed without being shot.
We’ll be ready when park rangers can ask people to social distance without being shoved in a lake.
We’ll be ready when store employees can ask people to wear a mask before entering without being killed.
We’ll be ready when we can show we can listen and follow safety guidelines.
I don’t know when the virus will be ready for us to re-open but clearly we are not ready.
Freedom is a responsibility not just an unearned privilege to do as we please.
We are acting like a bunch of spoiled whiny brats who are more than willing to hurt others and put others at risk.
We’ll be ready when we treat each other with love and respect.
We are not ready.
- Rev. Stephen McKinney Whitaker
This is, for me, the biggest difference in what I see relative to here vs back home. The tone and content of social media messaging. The rhetoric from our elected leaders. The responsibility of those business owners.
Canada is in a tough spot financially - we are shedding jobs at a comparingly alarming rate to the US.
And Canada's rate of infection and mortality isn't that far off from the US when you remove NYC from the equation.
But my hope for here is higher because people are wearing masks when out and about. There isn't some uproar around masks, that conflate actual liberty with the need to wear a mask. The mask hasn't become some empty symbol of freedom. We don't have mass gatherings of people, armed, headed to state capitols to spit in faces or yell and demand that they can get a haircut. This hasn't become a litmus test for liberty that really only serves to highlight the privilege a lot of people have actually experienced if this is, for them, oppression.
Measures, like in the article I listed, are being taken seriously up here - and in a lot of places in the US, too, I know. But the tone of dialogue is totally different.
Now, I know a lot of people have been rude and unempathetic up here - I've heard stories from friends and acquaintances who work in grocery stores and restaurants. Many interactions are ugly.
I know we need to re-open and the steps are being implemented, but framing it as a matter of flag-waving freedom to get a haircut or go to a gym or not wear a mask seems to be a tangential argument to the real argument.
And the real argument is this oppression that has been something brewing for a long while now and has increasingly capitalized on by legislators and candidates.