Page 51 - Sonoma County Gazette May 2020

Dancing On The Edge Of Time
Trying to remember the old steps, and trying to learn these strange, new rhythms. The tune has definitely changed. Are we up to it? We better be – but time will tell. This cannot be written off with our usual clichés. Something huge has changed; many things will never be the same! It’s not just the CORONAVIRUS. It’s fundamental things that will never be the same.
The majority of our present U.S. population has very little or no experience of not having vaccines for diseases that once killed thousands, when some
of us who are still hanging on were just young children. Measles, mumps, chicken pox and polio – those struck stark, raving fear in the hearts of parents... way back when. Many of their children just died. Even when vaccines were developed, many were skeptical to the point of refusal, for fear of losing their children by deliberate infection! For some, the concept of vaccines was hard to understand.
This Coronavirus horror is a new experience in “distancing” for most, and horribly reminiscent for some of us. Close the schools – indefinitely? Mandate facemasks? Enforce social distancing? Uncertain durations for closed schools and nonessential businesses?
What’s going on?
Those of us old enough to remember things like collecting scrap metal in
our little red wagons during WWII, can also well remember how the word “epidemic” could freeze you in fear because it always meant many, many deaths. Solutions and vaccinations for some diseases were yet to come –
many years later. For those of you too young to have lived thru it, the Polio epidemic struck panic and fear in all of us. Jonas Salk developed the vaccine years after the first horrible epidemics. We were sent to school throughout, and would come to school and find empty desks – only to learn another classmate or two had died overnight of the mysterious affliction. We did not know enough then to know how we unknowingly helped perpetuate! Everyone was afraid...
But many of today’s younger generations are very full of themselves – some protesting the importance of isolation, some flat out refusing advice and
even ignoring mandates. For the most part, today the horrors of those past epidemics are just stories to them. (In fairness, not all.) But it only takes a few to endanger the whole.
Death by an unfamiliar stranger, that’s what. Pandemic.
Today? Isolation as much as possible is part of the solutions puzzle.
CORONAVIRUS is the new kid in town, and it has been amazing to hear an ignorant, ambitious president blow it off, deny and lie. Only when some self-serving aspect arose did his administration concede to the facts, the process and the truths of the matter. Thank goodness cooler and vastly more intelligent minds and voices prevail -- our own Governor Newsom and Governor Cuomo of New York, to name just two – managing intelligent messages of process and necessity to the greater citizenship.
SONOMA COUNTY BOOKMOBILE
freebookmobile.org - NEWS on Facebook - 707.520.4536 Donations welcome, Glen Weaver, Director
More than 300,000 books given away, and counting...
We are all part of this dance.
“The Free Bookmobile of Sonoma County would love to be out giving away books
in the community. We will continue
to follow health authorities orders
Our entire social fabric is radically changing and evolving in the face of this Pandemic. Nothing of the greater assumptions of our external social patterning will be as it was before this pandemic. And, that influence will inevitably impact the design of our internal social and familial patterns and practices as well.
to stay home, however, while maintaining readiness to resume our usual activities as soon as possible.
When the shelter-in-place order is
lifted, please check our schedule on
our website at freebookmobile.org to find out where we will be.”
I, and many of you out there, will not see most of the progressions of this story – or, more gently stated, the evolution and patterning for the next 20 years. Where it inexorably and ultimately takes the generations you and I created, we will never know! Darn! I truly wish I could be part of engineering the solutions, adjusting the patterns and building survival modems. But, our children will have to do it. I guess we will just have to settle for the chilling hope that we prepared them well enough.
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