Dispatches from Quarantine:
Young People on Covid-19

May 6th, 2020
7th Week Since School Closure

So far today I have gone to online classes, finished school work, and read the news. There is nothing more to say about what I’ve done today and accordingly I’d like to talk about what’s happened this week and this month, particularly the act of going out. Sometimes we joke about how what was once the most tedious part of the weekend—going to get groceries—has become the highlight of the entire week, the pinnacle of our repetitive lives at home as the one sure opportunity for going out, the practical equivalent of breathing or blinking in the “old” world. Now, though, to go out is largely viewed as a selfish act, one which puts our own desire for a little happiness over the safety of all. Scientifically speaking, a sound culture of staying home and controlling a pandemic. Humanly speaking, a foreign and unsettling denial of a foundation of normal life. 

I think I’m starting to sound too much like an article in the New York Times (which I would know because we’ve been given access to the full NYT subscriptions through June as students,) over-analyzing the new kind of world we live in. 

In reality, grocery shopping is just as tedious as before, if not more so. I’ve been with my mom a few times to keep her company (and, admittedly, I’m feeling increasingly guilty about it…in the line to get into the store, we’re the only party with more than one person, much less a teenager, while my twin sister is always the first to say that she’ll be staying in because that’s what we’re supposed to be doing.) We go grocery shopping on Sundays and I’ve been going less and less but I confess that we also go out on Saturday mornings to a local Greek market and bakery. Both are small local businesses, so of course, “you go to spend money and support the small business,” as everyone likes to say in some form or other these days. In the beginning I thought little about these weekly, superfluous trips to the Greek market and the bakery, loading up on good bread and foodstuffs that would offer something small to look forward to in my newly unvarying and unremarkable routine. But now I worry that these, too, are at odds with the general guidelines for “flattening the curve,” another expression used constantly. If I go out Saturday mornings on unnecessary trips to get bread and the pita chips my sister really likes, does that make me a bad person? Have I now – given the chance to prove my civic commitment and loyalty to the greater good – failed? Is this small, increasingly less enjoyable outing a reflection of what lies below: the truth about me?

I think that’s one piece of this pandemic that should be captured in its social history. Sometimes we are asked to think about big questions like: Would you be willing to die for something you believed in? Given the choice between doing what is right and what will make you happy, which would you choose? And so on. It seems that taking this pandemic seriously has forced these kinds of questions on to me. And I’d like to clarify—nobody I know of is making an extra trip to the supermarket and entering into some grand existential turmoil as a result.  Nobody’s talking about conflicting feelings of guilt and desire at the dinner table, in our yard when talking with the neighbors, over videocall, or anywhere else. But they’re there, at least a little bit, and what’s worse is we don’t even always know what the course of action will truly help flatten the curve the most. Case in point: I remember how society collectively condemned and derided anyone who wore face masks at the beginning of the pandemic, maybe back in January/February, as simply panicking and as uninformed. I don’t deny that I definitely judged the people I saw wearing masks on the T, too. How stupid that seems now, now that we’re all required by the state governor to wear face covering when leaving the house. 

Conversely, this pandemic has given us a kind of opportunity in life we might have never gotten otherwise. My sister and I have gotten much closer, in a way I don’t know if we’d ever have been able to do if there hadn’t been a national (well, state-by-state technically) shutdown. We video-called with my nana this weekend, something I would never have believed I’d do in my lifetime, and evidently neither did she as she smiled broadly into the camera while she talked with us from several hours away. I’ve been playing board games like Monopoly with my family (my mom’s been crushing us,) reading the news more, and spent more time working on my Italian. I’ve even started teaching myself to type the proper way! 

Looking into the future, I hope these new opportunities continue as the pandemic, with any luck, declines.

That’s all for today,
Jack