Grey is this March morning. Five days now inside-a virus is my jailer. I have to get out. This virus is the jailer of everyone I know that is over sixty. Boomers. The freest of all generations must now be locked down for our own protection. I will get out. I will walk, but I will do it alone and I will keep my distance.
Watching the news, I see Boomers, my generation, still going out to restraints and coffee shops. My heart sinks. We were the people who marched, protested and sang to bring about peace. We took action to ensure equality and to end harm to others. To those of you sitting there, sipping lattes in busy coffee shops, your actions are violating our code, do no harm my friends.
Remember when HIV/AIDS roared out with deadly ferocity in our prime years of sexual activity? Remember the tag line? When you have unprotected sex, you are having unprotected sex with every partner your partner has ever had? Well this novel virus is kind of like that.
For every person you touch and interact with breaking the six-foot circle of safety, (some say ten), you are interacting with everyone they have similarly interacted with over the last 7-10 days. The virus moves quickly and easily. Such exposure could be deadly to you or someone your love. Change is hard, but life is change. We boomers, the pig in the python we have been called, are a very social bunch. Time to move our socializing from face to face to online.
Boomers were all about social justice. All people should have equal rights; we championed that cause. In some areas we won. In others we didn’t. We had a corollary mantra, as long as I don’t hurt someone else leave me alone to do what I want.
Well to my mind flattening the curve is an issue of supreme social justice. We have hospitals, and we have equipment in those hospitals that can save lives during this pandemic. However, we will overwhelm the system if we don’t flatten the curve and spread it out over many months. If we all get sick at once, there will not be enough ventilators, or staff, to care for every person needing care. If we all end up sick at the same time, people will die that otherwise would have lived if the curve had been flattened.
Boomers, we were supposed to be the generation of love and compassion. Boomers we were supposed to be the generation of social progress. Boomers our songs were filled with mantras of caring concern like, “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother”. Right now, in order to live out the messages we played at maximum volume in the day, we have to step back. We have to accept a solo life this season.
As I noted earlier this is being written by a Boomer for Boomers. A friend of mine, slightly older than me (but who shares a love of Ocean City, NJ) wrote that we grew up in a different time and that the paradigm of life for the young has shifted. He seemed to assert we don’t understand the generation that has grown up wired from the get go’s paradigm and that they don’t understand our's. True. It was the same for us; we didn’t understand the minds and souls of our parents who had lived through the deprivations of, and fought in the horrors of, the Second World War.
Where the generation before us saw the evil in humanity, we saw the hope of brotherhood and love. Where the generation before us saw good in living a regimented and rule driven life in a world with neat and definitive order, we saw the potential in broad freedom for creativity, for discovery, for humanity’s growth.
Well, right now, right here, this is our last best chance as a generation to show that what we believed meant something. This is where we listen and make our individual choices that add up to a collection generation’s retrenchment into our self-isolation cocoons for the benefit of the world, for the health and well-being of our sisters and brothers.
Unless you are out of food, stay away from stores. Unless you really need help, stay away from other people. There should be no need for police with weapons to be walking our blocks telling us to finish your dog walks and get back in. We have personal responsibility. The gun thing, this is happening in some European states. Respect the quarantine.
This moment is where we show those following us what the peace and love generation was about. By self-isolating we are working toward an ongoing community, toward the survival of our world. Our time is almost gone, let’s show the world we will walk the walk of love and compassion to the end.
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