How long has it been since we have been in containment, confinement, isolation, lockdown, quarantine, staying at home, wfh, Zooming, etc.? This past Saturday, April 25, was forty days since the shelter in place order went into effect on March 17 for 7 counties here in the Bay Area.
How are you holding up?
For my part what I find most curious and particularly disconcerting during this time is the lack of critical assessment of government’s role (does anyone even know?) in issuing these orders.
As a California resident of a Bay Area county, and especially now that the orders will be extended through May here, I want to know who is making the calls to impose these orders, with authority based on what laws exactly and what cost-benefit trade-off of civil liberties i.A.
What I find more unsettling than the government encroaching on boundaries in issuing these draconian measures, is the general lack of constructive questioning thereof.
In separate conversations today I asked two friends, one in Manhattan and the other in Brooklyn, how they are doing. What I was really interested in though is what it is like for them talking to other friends and family during this time.
From various personal exchanges I had over the weekend, I was getting this sense that there seems to be two camps of general moods, at least within my circle. Some friends sound more on the subdued side, whether it’s from exhaustion, resignation or both, while other exchanges were markedly charged.
While writing a friend last week, it occurred to me that I neither have words or know how to express whatever it is we are collectively experiencing but each individually going through while in this imposed containment. At the same time I had started listening to a podcast conversation between Helga Davis and Sarah Jones in which the term “Grielief” was discussed.
Somehow the term “Grielief” as with the whole conversation, although recorded in 2017, is remarkably resonant at this very moment. Despite all the heavy topics discussed, it is uplifting. And from what it sounds like we can all use something uplifting in the midst of this.