Think outside the box

Humans appreciate creative solutions to vexing problems. We praise the adventurous souls who "think outside the box." But when the answer works it simply changes the shape and reinforces the structure of the box, because the box is the solid structure of society.

Thinkers outside the box are like space-walking astronauts. They're only useful when they're close to the ship, ministering directly to it. Untethered, they drift into space to die alone.

Successful box-dwellers find something useful to do inside it. It's full of all kinds of functions we have made necessary, requiring leadership and initiative to manage. You need a strong work ethic, and a belief in the shared values that have brought us so far from our primitive roots. Even our fringe dwellers recognize that success is defined by where you are in the box. If you go outside of it, you need to keep your feet planted on the top of it, so that people can still see you, and you can feed off of the box's resources.

At one point, hominid social organization consisted of one big ape who could beat up all the smaller apes. He would enjoy his period of dominance before age caught up with him and a new dominant ape would take the top spot. Evolution happened. Smaller hominids figured out how to defeat pure brawn, and could now exploit it. Aggressive muscle remains as dangerous a power source as a leaky nuclear reactor, but we've grown accustomed to it. It manifests itself in gun violence and domestic abuse and warlike ideologies now. It's the least desirable expression of liberty. But it saturates the structure of the box. All is measured against the box in some way.

There is no escape. Not one that you can survive for long, anyway. Act like you are far outside, by disregarding the norms, and you might as well be surrounded by airless blackness and implacable cold. You're not really outside. You're in the bottom of it, with the broken things and the dirt swept down from the tended levels above you. You are disconnected and seen as useless.

Norms change. Gradually we've come to accept things that had been too disturbing. What sets you apart is not what you are as much as what you do. Superficialities of appearance and behavior matter less. You can then be judged by how well your actions improve life for the box dwellers who matter.

The public good is nothing to sneeze at

People's breath has been weaponized. That's the threat facing us right now. Every time you leave your home, you face the possibility that some perfectly robust looking individual will cough or sneeze or laugh or otherwise exhale forcefully and envelop you in a cloud of microscopic particles that could infect you. Once infected, you will find out how this new disease interacts with your particular genetics and physical condition. Your odds get worse if you are over 60 years of age, but old people have survived with minimal ill effects and young people have died of complications. You just don't know.

In a situation like this, you'd think that adoption of some rudimentary precautions would be universally accepted. But this is America, where disagreement is a matter of principle. We are not the only country so afflicted, but we certainly stand out as one of the most divided and argumentative. It used to be seen as a source of synergy, but it is now -- and really always has been -- indicative of an ongoing war to control the entire country. Are we peaceful or warlike? Do we celebrate our diversity or aspire to be a pure white nation of heteronormative Christians and nothing else?

That's a lot of shit to lay on your trip to the grocery store, but that's where we are. If you go out in public these days, you have to worry not only about all the details of hygiene to avoid accidental contamination, but about the mouth-breathing antagonists who will surround you.

Some places are better than others. Some places are better at different times than others. Manly enclaves like stores where you buy hardware and auto parts are liable to be full of unmasked people forcing you to live at their level of risk tolerance.

People don't understand masks. It's not body armor. It's a condom for your breath. That analogy doesn't hold up perfectly, because a condom guards against infection equally in both directions, when properly used, whereas a mask mostly blocks outgoing breath droplets -- less than perfectly, I admit -- better than it blocks incoming hostile fire from the lung contents of naked-faced freedom fighters who might or might not be actively aggressive on top of their basic selfish, sociopathic unconcern.

I have to go to the grocery store tomorrow. I would also like to pick up a few items at the hardware store, but I don't look forward to wondering how I will be received with my facial covering. This inclines me to choose the store that advertises their precautions as a selling point, rather than one where they obviously don't care.

We all wonder who will turn out to have been right in their approach. You'd think that having the highest infection numbers in the world would have begun to answer that, but the proponents of mass death are counting on the fact that the survivors will get over any grievances once they realize that what's done is done, and that they might as well accept the losses and move on. People are resilient. If you're still capable of enjoying life at all, you'll learn to do it without any friends and family members who succumbed to the plague. Take the hard hit and power through.

Occasionally you hear of a lockdown protester who then got the disease and had a change of heart, but in a country of 330 million people, 80 or 90 thousand dead doesn't distribute corpses widely enough to get the attention of most of us. It's all theoretical. And most people survive, some with few or no symptoms, at least in the short run.

All we've had is the short run. Scientists are studying the problem from every angle, learning as much as they can, but it's a new condition for our species. We don't know long term effects because no one has had a long term yet. Thanks to the rebellious mouth breathers, thousands of us won't get one, either. Who will it be? How much will you care when it's you or someone close to you? Tune in next week, and the week after that, and the week after that, for many, many more weeks, to find out.

If you see something, say nothing

Most people know better than to idealize small town life. For all of the benefits of community support, those are completely revocable in the case of community rejection and censure. Especially for someone in business in a small town, risky assertions are a luxury.

At this point, any comments about anyone’s personal and public pandemic protective measures are off limits. It doesn’t matter if you see grocery clerks licking packages before putting them out, or restaurant staff French-kissing random people in the parking lot. Individual safety is up to individuals. This is a free country. We’re all going to have to do business with each other when the current inconvenience dies down. Gotta look to the future, regardless of who doesn’t get to have one because they proved to be genetically inferior and were culled by this largely trivial illness making the rounds.

In a small town, if enough people take a dislike to you, you're dead. Maybe not literally dead, but shunned. It's not just for colonial times. It's human nature. You don't want to risk it. You're better off to keep your trap shut.

Community standards determine what is risky. Things that might repel one person have a robust following among others. Free speech belongs to the dominant group, not to individuals. To be more precise, free speech has consequences, and those consequences hit harder on minorities and individuals than on the majority point of view. If everyone else jumped off a bridge you might be able to avoid jumping off of it with them, but make sure you stand aside and say nothing against bridge jumping. Protect yourself as best you can. Let the world burn.

You want pathogens with that?

The deli mentioned in an earlier post upped the ante yesterday, when three young members of the staff all trotted out to the parking lot to greet the occupants of two cars that had just pulled in. Close contact included not just stuffing themselves each in turn into the back seat of a compact car with whoever was sitting there, but full-on hugs with others who had emerged from the other vehicle. Then they trotted back into the deli to continue preparing food for public consumption.

Large numbers of their patrons still opt to go inside the tiny space to pick up their orders. For those who want to stay in their cars and have it brought out, one of the plucky huggers will carry the bag out and hand it to you.

With all the businesses that have closed due to recommended best practices, the ones still operating have to advertise their availability. I suggest that the deli use the slogan, "You bet your life we're open!"

When the onslaught of this disease is over we will know who was overreacting. Will the cautious look foolish or will the casual look foolhardy? How much are you willing to bet that we have nothing to worry about?

The fearless

Some people are treating this coronavirus situation like running with the bulls, or jumping off a cliff with a wing suit. It’s just another grand adventure in a world of risk.

Get a grip, people. We’re talking about routine bullshit like going to the grocery store, or putting gas in the car. If I’m going to take stupid risks with my own health and the health of others, I at least want it to be fun, like having unprotected sex for most of the 1970s. I don't want it to be from scratching my nose after touching the door handle at work.

The people facing the real risks are not grooving on it. Have you heard any doctors and nurses say that it's exaggerated?

Bravado is a coping mechanism for some people. That's fine, we all have our ways. Just respect the ways of others as we all try to get through this.

I'm trying to get my nerve up to wear a mask. It's a big step in an image-conscious society. You can maintain distance in your normal garb. You can find excuses to wear gloves in various contexts. But the mask...that's a big move. That makes it real. The weather is too warm to hide it behind a scarf, especially in a store. You'd look weird, muffled in a scarf as you scan the shelves for whatever the hoarders have left. Real casual.

Mask advocates are working on many options. I want something humorous and original. Of course nothing is original, but if I came up with it on my own it's okay if others came up with the same thing. There's no way to look like you're unconcerned when you're wearing something so unusual in our culture. It's a bold statement. You might even call it fearless.

An influx of New Yorkers

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.

COVID-19: Foraging in a dangerous world

We're still allowed to go out to get food and other necessities, but will you find them?

The nearest grocery store to my house is about seven miles away. It's on my way to work, or home from work, depending on the time of day. It's your typical modern supermarket, complete with pharmacy. On a normal day I would find almost all of what I was looking for.

In these abnormal days, the smart shopper gets there when the doors open. Even then, don't expect to find everything on your list. So then what?

There are other stores in just about every direction, mostly farther away. On social media, people share their reports. Those reports are seen at least by their friends, if not by an unlimited audience. Also, we're told to limit our exposure to other people and public contact points. Personally, I like to limit how much gasoline I use anyway. This is reinforced by the information that gas pump handles are some of the most contaminated surfaces. It was always true, but the new virus appears to be pretty hardy. Anything a lot of people touch is more likely to spread infection.

All this takes place in a buzz of information, some warning of dire risk, some dismissing the concern of millions of people as a panic over nothing.

The designated forager in a household has to decide how far to venture in search of whatever was not available at their first stop. How many door handles is it worth? How often do the workers in this emporium wash their hands and clean their work stations? How much should you worry at all?

Are Americans more self conscious than other nationalities about looking stupid? It seems like a lot of what goes around the internet these days counsels looking cool at all costs. The "be cool" posts mostly minimize those costs, but some of them are now saying, "go ahead and die, you're helping the economy." So we have two strains going: the It's Nothing strain, and the Bleeding Lungs of Courage strain. The most important factor for both of them is that you not look like you were worried when this is all over. There's even a batch of apparently scientific information going around to the effect that the virus isn't as bad as we think, and that it will wind down sooner than later.

The problem with the quest for treasures in the retail wilderness is that the threat is not from visible monsters. It's from that person next to you in the bread aisle, or a spot you missed when disinfecting your shopping cart. It's a random sneeze cloud over a sidewalk that looks deserted by the time you get there. You can't put on your armor and grab your magic sword. You can't zap it with your death ray, dive and roll, and draw a bead on the next bogey coming out of an alley as you pass. At most you might have rubber gloves and a paper mask, which you must throw away as soon as you return to your pod, there to decontaminate before entering. How important was it to go out in the first place, and into every other place that you investigated in your search?