What the hell

I drove to Lowe's Saturday morning to donate blood in the Bloodmobile. It took me a long time to decide to volunteer because I always have "side effects" after I give my blood away and I wasn't too sure how safe it would be during this pandemic. 

But after I drove into the Lowe's parking lot, worry about the safety inside the Bloodmobile was the last thing on my mind. There were a whole lot of people in the parking lot watching three emergency vehicles by the garden center (I found out later there had been a small fire inside Lowe's) and I would say about 90% of these people were not wearing masks. 

Now, I've read that wearing a mask won't stop a person from being infected with the coronavirus; it's supposed to stop infected people from transmitting the virus if, for whatever reason, an infected person still wants to go shopping at Lowe's (yeah, I know, some people don't know they're infected). I don't believe that wearing a mask in public is useless; that mask is still between me and the infected. Man, this sounds like something out of The Walking Dead. The infected. 

Which brings me back to Lowe's and all those people not wearing masks. It looked like an ordinary Saturday in spring with a lot of people shopping for garden and home repair/renovation supplies. Just another ordinary Saturday -- oh yeah, I forgot. Ordinary as in humans being stalked and killed by the thousands by an invisible serial-murdering microbe. Sounds like fun to me. So, let's throw caution aside because it's spring and sunny and warm but not hot and life goes on . . . even if you get sick tomorrow and possibly die. What the hell, right?

I know many people don't really believe in the seriousness of this virus. When I mentioned the amount of people not wearing masks to the medical tech in the Bloodmobile at Lowe's and facetiously asked had the coronovirus stopped, he said "Did it ever start?" Now, I wasn't about to get into a fake news political discussion with this grumpy man who obviously didn't want to be at work that day (and maybe every day), but I think many people feel that the countrywide lock-down is overblown and unnecessary. And now anti-virus containment measures are being scaled back, which, no doubt, makes all the protesters and the bored shut-ins and the businesses happy. 

So, I guess we'll see what's going to happen. Human lives vs. economic stability. I wonder who/what will win . . . if there is such a thing as winning in a pandemic, because I'm sure healthcare workers with PTSD, recovered people with lifelong repercussions, and those without jobs (who may never find another job like the one they had) will never be the same.

Everyone is screaming to go back to "normal" but I think we should stop and think about what we're doing, and maybe change some of our habits. Maybe we should not be so focused on consumerism and getting ahead and trying to be trendy and cool. Maybe we should just be quiet for a while and listen to the earth, our own spirits, our own breath. Maybe we should slow down and think about what it truly means to be alive. Maybe the universe is giving us another chance to evaluate how we're living and how we're all connected to each other.

"I am just a human being trying to make it in a world

    that is rapidly losing its understanding of being human." 

John Trudell