The Quarantine Diary 2
Day 2
It’s not “Day 2” in any sense other than being the second day I’ve dedicated time to writing about this experience.
There was a brief period, about one week, when people stopped hoarding food from our local grocery store. We changed our shopping habit so that instead of going daily, we would go every two or three days, to lessen exposure to others, and in case we are asymptomatic carriers, others’ exposure to us.
The morning after Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida, finally issued the stay-at-home order for our state, I unabashedly gave in to being a jerk. Since I have been working from home, I went early in the morning to the store and grabbed a week’s worth of groceries, including meat. I didn’t want to be like this, and I wasn’t doing it out of panic. I was doing it because I fucking knew how people were about to act, and I wasn’t disappointed. Isabella went back two days later to get some milk and once again, the shelves looked like a hurricane was coming. Still, there are no indications that there is a problem with the food supply chains. Yet, aisle after aisle is raped bare, in spite of the “two per customer” labels tagged on to more and more shelves. Either America has eaten every chicken on the planet, or someone is reselling it all on eBay. There’s no way that this sustained pillaging has failed to satiate our region’s true grocery needs.
The nightly news tries to ameliorate its unforgiving bombardment of coronavirus information by punctuating each broadcast with a “Gee, we’re swell!” story about people helping people. Those stories are nice, but they do little to restore my faith in humanity. After showing us twenty-five minutes of people saying the virus is a hoax, and governors refusing to issue stay-at-home orders, and people collecting in dangerously large numbers in churches and at beaches because, godammmit, FREEDOM! –- after all of that, can we really be expected to feel our souls nourished in the last five minutes of the broadcast because a ten year-old girl sewed a superman mask for a firefighter?
Yeah, yeah. I get it. Two weeks of this, and I’m already angry and depressed. But it’s not true. I’m getting a lot of work done, and helping the others in my office. I’m enjoying my family. I’m working in my garden and joining in the house cleaning.
So no, I’m not angry or depressed. I’m just disappointed.