Let's not play this game. Right now, the world is worried about the vision of an ongoing perpetual pandemic and we've got people in California, in Michigan, in Minnesota and other places protesting in a complaint that amounts to, "But Mommmm....all the other kids get to watch that show." I know Tiger King ended, but now isn't the time to audition for what could be the next Train Wreck Reality show smash hit.
Every place that understands we all hang together or we all hang seperately, is knuckling down for the long haul, knowing this will be hard on business, on education, on families, but not as hard as bodies stacked and burried in a mass grave. We need to counter the contagion of ignorance, which is more deadly to society than even this disease.
All of us are writers. All of us know how to use words to cut through something of the crud of life to reveal truth, and move hearts to feel something beyond what they'd planned before they read our work. The world right now, needs the gifts this room has to offer, in your local papers, to your local newscasts. Write Op-eds to whatever news source you watch/consume and let's start providing a counter to all the missinformation that people defend to the point (in this case) of potentially causing other people's deaths.
As to the reality of businesses being also a casualty of this pandemic, it is true. Right now, we have begun to overload the system with new claims of job losses, so we need to be equally creative in finding ways to work and provide means to work. Work has within it, a basic dignity beyond the pay check, and for most of us, is a necessity not only for finacial reasons, but as part of who we are. We've chosen professions for a reason, because they satisfy something in us that isn't found even in familial relationships.
The reality of this pandemic sets into sharp relief the difference between being a consumer who wishes to go on consuming, and a citizen who understands, our whole world depends upon us sublimating our desires to do what we want when we want it. Write to the states that keep opening up beaches and places and thus allow for a restart of the infection process. Write to your representatives and senators and urge them to find creative ways to let small businesses stay alive.
Call your small business friends and ask, what can I do? Call your friends who work for places that were furloughed and say, "What do you need?" Ask the local restaurants to give to the local shelters, or to make all their waitstaff delivery people, and give them the same wage, so they can go on. Create a national, let's support our local restaurants night a week, to help sustain them. Do the same with the other businesses out there.
As writers, we know, the most creative, resourceful, inventive weapon/machine/resource in the world, is the mind. If all of our minds push on the problem, the small minds that aren't seeing it, will be washed away by the tsuami of imaginative problem solving and civic strength from all of us. Call on all you know, via words, via phone, Zoom, and what have you, so that we who are trying both for those we love, and all around us who have loved ones, including the misguided, uninformed and self focused, can help save everyone from the primary threat (Disease and death) and the secondary one (economic ruin and ignorance).
I'm going to get off my soap box now and go write some letters.
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