Thank you for doing your part to protect each other
For those getting bored at home, I know it is challenging in this time of COVID-19 to socially distance, wear a facial covering, avoid careless passers-by, and keep six feet from the refrigerator.
But there are positives. In Zoom meetings, new to me, I have come to appreciate seeing everyone’s faces, although some are taking the extra precaution of creating a kind of digital mask by showing only their foreheads and ceiling.
I have enjoyed FaceTime interchanges with my seven grandchildren, ages 12 to 2. When I ask about schoolwork, I hear, “Grandfather, my educational workload is not sufficient to quench my thirst for knowledge. In the words of an equally unsatisfied fictitious 19th-century Dickensian youth, I ask of you, ‘please sir, may I have some more?’” And that was the four-year-old preschooler (yes, we’re very proud).
OK, the truth is, when using distance learning with young ones at home, academic discipline is challenging. But all of us are being challenged by our lifestyle changes forced upon us. After all, we must remind ourselves we are in a global pandemic, and one-third of the world’s cases are here in our country.
My message is this: Thank you for doing your part, and let’s all be good to each other as a community.
And be careful. Intelligent policy has helped Mainers so far, but pandemic disease doesn’t respect political borders. If you haven’t had it yet, it’s looking for you; the virus survives by finding new hosts.
With no vaccines becoming available, all adults, including younger adults and middle-aged adults, are having life and death scares, and tragedy, in large numbers across the country.
But, as a serial killer, this invisible biological invader prefers to hunt older people. Maine, like Italy, has an older population.
Merely as a byproduct of aging, seniors’ immune systems are naturally diminished, something to do with T-cells, macrophages, and antibodies. Think of the many older Americans who have given and yet have much to give, people like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, David McCullough, Jimmy Carter, Betty White, Tom Brady. We can respect them, and everyone’s grandparents, including those in your family, by strictly observing pandemic guidelines.
Our anxieties are real and justified; our actions should be constructive. The governor leveled with us with her four-month blueprint, tentative as it is. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell, on Zoom, told my daughter and her co-workers yesterday, “The path to success requires truth and trust.” In crisis, when leaders provide us truth, they earn our trust.
The numbers are deadly serious. Twenty-four thousand Americans received their positive test results yesterday. The United States has three times as many deaths as any other nation. By the beginning of April New York City had surpassed the losses of 9/11. By the end of the month, there were more American deaths from coronavirus than all the American deaths in Vietnam over 10 years.
In June, 1969, Life Magazine touched the hearts of Americans when they published the individual faces of 200 soldiers in an article entitled, “One Week,s Toll.” The number of people in neighboring Massachusetts who died of COVID-19 on Thursday, just one day, was 157.
May Day, May 1, honors the contribution of the world’s workers, and the month of May is celebrated as Older Americans Month. It’s appropriate that we take this moment to recognize that each of us must do what we can, both in public policy and personal behavior, to protect these two groups who are in the cross-hairs of this deadly attacker: our healthcare workers and our senior citizens. Lives depend on it.
Babbidge of Kennebunk represents District 8 in the Maine House of Representatives. He was formerly a teacher in Greenville.