Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Even walking has been constrained by the requirement we wear masks. And I fully expect walking, except for the toiletry needs of dogs will, "with a heavy heart" be banned because "people just won't listen."
An aside - I will be thrilled when the neighborhood dogs all poop at home and stop marking my bushes for every other dog to relieve himself on. That actually seems quite civil to me.
As an avid gardener I have been dismayed by the last few years' Poop Parade every night.
An aside - I will be thrilled when the neighborhood dogs all poop at home and stop marking my bushes for every other dog to relieve himself on. That actually seems quite civil to me.
As an avid gardener I have been dismayed by the last few years' Poop Parade every night.
In my village we have pooper-scooper laws. And when walking dogs is the only outside activity allowed I'm buying a dog; maybe an attack-trained Golden Retriever because only outlaws will be out on the street.
It helps to put it some perspective. A few pragmatic thoughts:
I'm in my Seventies. My maternal grandmother's first real house was a sod house on the prairie and she remembered twisting tall grass to burn. My paternal grandmother had the first flush toilet in town. DH remembers trotting to the outhouse in the dark of night in below zero weather and there was no toilet paper ever. Not even for company! Heh. He also remembers when they got their first telephone. There were nine of them in a house with five rooms - after they added the addition.
We had no TV until I was ten and then we had one channel. Our fun was mostly self made and we were rarely bored.
I don't think our town ever got much larger than five-hundred people at its largest but we were pretty self-contained. There was someone with a skill for each need and people got along well because we were interdependent on each other. We had no social services, no law enforcement and one doctor for several countries. Doc knew what you could afford and he'd take payment in a hog or chickens or sometimes for free. We took care of the social services and law enforcement ourselves. Much of our commerce was done in trade.
This was all just a blink of an eye ago.
Life has always been dangerous and we've always been a breath way from death. Before penicillin you could get a skin tear working in the barn and be dead from blood poisoning within a week.
It's just that we've forgotten because of the bounteous services we now have. And we've grown to have an expectation that nothing should go wrong, so certain of our self-containment and people being at our disposal at the dial of a number that we are outraged when what seem to be preventable deaths occur.
Maybe the worst that's happened in our confidence is that we no longer need a sense of spiritual security. We've got science "people" for that. (And yet a good deal of what keeps us healthy and happy has a spiritual component to it.) I'm not going to try to explain that. You either get it or you don't and it's not about church.
I'm thinking it wouldn't be the worst thing to have to develop smaller more interdependent communities again. The old days weren't so physically healthy but I think they had a measure of social health that we are missing today.
Today our locus of control is so far from home that we can easily feel helpless.
We are a part of this big cycle of humanity growing and waning and maybe this time we're on a tail end. From a historical point of view we wouldn't be the first. I shudder to think of those poor folks that lived during the ice age.. The plagues. The war torn areas for centuries. Why should we be exempt? The wheel turns.
Do we have unrealistic expectations?
Wow, this is an amazing perspective, thank you. I think you are correct. Our ancestors would probably be rolling over in their graves about now to see & hear our hysteria.
Homo sapiens are in the animal kingdom.
Some evolve .
And some devolve by risking money over the larger picture of health and safety.
Some people just want to take a stroll in the park or go visit a friend without risking being arrested for it. That is the choice of freedom over a little less safety.
When you say it's "not forever" how long do you think is acceptable? No one will answer that question.
Changes will have to occur in a minimum of two week cycles, because without extensive testing that's how long it takes to see any changes in the public health status. Once the trend is strongly downward (or has reached zero), we can make a policy change; wait two weeks, then see what happened. If the trend is still going downward, we can make another change. We keep going until the trend starts moving upward again.
With rapid and extensive testing, combined with contact tracing, we'll get faster updates and can respond accordingly. If promising drugs like remdesivir pan out, we may choose to risk higher infection rates.
Some people just want to take a stroll in the park or go visit a friend without risking being arrested for it. That is the choice of freedom over a little less safety.
Who is arresting people for taking walks? Who is supervising whether people visit friends or neighbors, or not? I saw on the LA forum, that cops have been stationed at the parks, but that's because groups of people were gathering there, ignoring the distancing guidelines. Elsewhere, families are out biking together, couples (married, from the looks of it) are strolling neighborhoods together, kids are throwing footballs in play fields, people are walking dogs in the dog park as always. In my town, even some museums are open.
Changes will have to occur in a minimum of two week cycles, because without extensive testing that's how long it takes to see any changes in the public health status. Once the trend is strongly downward (or has reached zero), we can make a policy change; wait two weeks, then see what happened. If the trend is still going downward, we can make another change. We keep going until the trend starts moving upward again.
With rapid and extensive testing, combined with contact tracing, we'll get faster updates and can respond accordingly. If promising drugs like remdesivir pan out, we may choose to risk higher infection rates.
Only problem with that approach is that the state governors are not buying into it. That's basically the Trump approach, but for whatever reason the governors want us to suffer.
Who is arresting people for taking walks? Who is supervising whether people visit friends or neighbors, or not? I saw on the LA forum, that cops have been stationed at the parks, but that's because groups of people were gathering there, ignoring the distancing guidelines. Elsewhere, families are out biking together, couples (married, from the looks of it) are strolling neighborhoods together, kids are throwing footballs in play fields, people are walking dogs in the dog park as always. In my town, even some museums are open.
The fact that people even have to think twice about taking a walk is a serious downer.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
