Folks around here grumble harsh comments about the arrival of a lot of people from away, who don't usually arrive until the most beautiful part of summer, and leave just as it ends. While most of them come from our neighboring state immediately to the south, I've seen some New York license plates as well, especially around Wolfeboro.
Given that we've been advised to avoid each other for weeks now, due diligence should continue to carry us through. But someone did point out that any infected incomers will put additional strain on our meager health care resources. It's poignant that we've already sold them all of the waterfront and, in some places, let them build gaudy palaces on hillsides and ridgelines. They already monopolize the best of the warm weather. Now they're liable to suck up all of the medical supplies and sicken our front-line medical personnel before most of us get a chance to.
Even the uninfected among them will get to see what it's like to live here during the months that they have not been able to. I remember the late 1980s, when it seemed like every immigrant was a city dweller who had racked up a few quick bucks in the early 1980s surge and was going to go live in the country and have either an inn or a village store. I arrived here in 1987, when this was at its height, like an airplane that had climbed too high and too steeply, and was about to stall and plunge. And so it came to pass. Northern New England went down first in that recession. Part of the blame goes to the economy in general. The rest of the exodus happened after thousands of fantasizing flatlanders got to see just how bugger ugly the place is for months and months.
They'll be going nuts within a couple of weeks, whether they've quarantined themselves or ventured out to mingle with a local population they may believe is untouched and unconcerned. There's nothing to do here.
There are locals who do act as if they are immune, or as if we all have nothing to worry about. Hey, the fatality rate is only 1-2 percent. A very small local deli is supposedly only doing carry-out, but the space is so small that people waiting inside have to take turns inhaling and exhaling, because a full house can't all inflate their chests at once. And the work space is so small that a six foot distance between the staff is utterly impossible. They are not concerned. One of them is the mother of an infant. She still comes to work. This whole thing is overblown. New Yorkers welcome.
Other businesses have shut completely. They did so before the governor's order to close non-essential businesses. The ones that remain open do so with varying degrees of stringent procedure in place.
The response from governments at the state and national level has been abysmal. We needed to be testing wide swaths of the population more than a month ago to determine where the virus was, so it could be contained. Supposedly focusing on minimizing economic disruption has guaranteed massive economic disruption. The general disregard for the welfare of citizens has gone unchallenged for decades. Will that change? The representatives of concentrated wealth hope that a beleaguered citizenry will be so grateful once the mess is over that they will fall into line and continue voting in favor of the plutocracy. At the same time, dismantled environmental protections will make it easier to dump your waste oil down a storm drain and burn a pile of your old tires without any social stigma, so that will make it popular with rank and file voters. No more will someone try to guilt trip us about throwing our trash out the car window whenever we feel like it. Good times are coming! What's a few thousand dead? They'll mostly be people we never even met.
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