Homo homini lupus est.
© photo copoyright Yenka Honig 2022
And We Thought We Were Done
He that is to govern a whole Nation, must read in himselfe, not this, or that particular man; but Man-kind;"
― Thomas Hobbes, "Leviathan"
I was in the health store buying organically regeneratively cultivated food when a family breezed in—two parents, three kids, two of the kids in the shopping cart—all unmasked, when one of the kids started sneezing, coughing and spurting phlegm all over her siblings and into the air. Though no one said a word, the shoppers pulled away. It's a small store, so this was not easy. I retrieved another mask from my back pocket—I only had a surgical on--and moved to the end of the check-out line. What was there to say or do other than that? Not much, unfortunately, except to leave the store without my organically regeneratively cultivated food, all of which I hope will keep me and my husband fortified for the BA variants upcoming before we get our FIFTH SHOT sometime in the autumn.
Whether this sweet sputtering child had Covid or not is irrelevant as there is no way to know. And it's not her responsibility anyway to consider the safety of the public at large. And she may have tested negative and just had an ordinary cold. But what were the adults thinking? Why not keep the child in the car, at least, with one of them. Was this too logistically difficult, too ethically challenging? Are they too busy to pay attention to anyone other than themselves and their immediate family?
Rhetorical questions.
It's summer and several friends and family members are traveling. We want to enjoy ourselves, see each other, see the world as it flails and burns. But we also have to preserve and repair. In the most global sense, the pandemic is a wake-up call, a symptom of the larger environmental challenge and the breakdown in international peace and cooperation.