‘….and I fall asleep counting my blessings.’ So the Irving Berlin song goes, made famous by Bing Crosby in the movie ‘White Christmas.’ I watched it the other day on one of the 1,000 or so cable channels that have been our mainstay during the COVID crisis. I forgot but was reminded of the funniest part of the movie- the low drag duet of Bing and Danny Kaye singing ‘Sisters’, but that’s a consideration for another blog post.
What’s more germane, though, is the first scene of the movie, in wartime with the soldiers in a forward position at risk of bombardment. It made me think of how when I would in better times complain about various and sundry to one of my best friends, a wise old bird of 101, her rejoinder has frequently been ‘Well, it isn’t wartime.’ And so I would then pull back from the emotional brink, and as Bing sang it, count my blessings.
However, that trope that has stood me so well for so many years doesn’t work anymore, because it is wartime, and against something we can’t see or yet with complete effectiveness fight against, but is every bit as devastating as cannon fire or an aerial bombardment. Where one had only to see the deathly grim statistics on the news reports to know this is so, very nearly all of us now has tragic first or second hand knowledge.
It astonishes me, though, that so very many people do not, however, seem to care and insist on being horrendously bad citizens. When the COVID epidemic first came upon us, and not yet recognized as a pandemic, health care experts advocated for the wearing of surgical masks, not so much, as they said at the time, for protecting oneself from the inhalation of the virus laden droplets exhaled by others, but more effectively to keep one’s possibly infectious droplets to oneself.
And nothing has really changed- wearing a mask is the quintessence of good and responsible citizenship. And, along with social distancing and staying within one’s bubble, is simple to accomplish.
Grievously astonishing, that so many people have so often since the start of this spurned best practice in favor of- what? Stupidity masking itself as some kind of selfishly wrongheaded expression of personal rights. But for every person who every time they should fails to wear a mask and/or practice social distancing, the question is begged- what about the rights of the rest of us? Another old friend, himself likewise a wise old bird well into his 90’s, mouthed the pithiest statement in this regard when he said ‘My rights end where yours begin.’ Neither you nor I have any right to ignore the right of anyone else to stay healthy.
So where does that leave us over the holiday season? Not a hoax, not an expression of partisanship, but a real live war that can be won.