Incubation Blues — Day 9 of the Shutdown

It is as if time crawled for the first seven days. Each day felt like a month.

As this new, restricted way of life becomes reality, the days are coming a bit faster. Life settles into a new routine. Dealing with the loss of used-to-be is still right there under the surface. I still think about what I would have been doing right now, if it wasn’t because of this shutdown. If only…

And those thoughts tell me that I am still dealing with loss. We all are.

At the same time, I am grateful that our governor shut down our state before it got super crazy leaving us in relatively good shape. I am grateful for the people in our local city government, who continually implement new measures to keep the virus from exploding here.

Early intervention is key. Dealing with anything unpleasant only gets worse when we ignore it.

“Oh, but it is not affecting me — and it is not affecting anyone I know. I can’t see it, therefore it can’t be true. So I won’t have to deal with it.”

Yeah right!

So kudos to California for getting it right. We also have a relatively low rate of community spread here.

I feel sad for other states and countries, in which leadership was slow to respond. These people are now paying the price. And dang, if we could have had a cohesive and determined national response… imagine that…

We didn’t.

It makes me so very, very sad.

Opportunities for early intervention were squandered and laughed about.

It is human nature to deny that which is difficult to deal with.

But denial is deadly.

Personal denial is deadly. And in this case, collective denial is catastrophically deadly.

When people in leadership who have been given the evidence and gotten the warnings don’t inform and educate the populations, and when they do not take the difficult and possibly unpopular steps to act early, they are responsible for deaths.

That is what leadership in war and crisis means.

They are responsible.