COVID19 - A U.S. Perspective
If you’ve ever said in regard to your busyness “I wish it would all just stop”, then your wish has come true!
Like everyone else at the moment, our family are trying to comprehend the enormity of the Covid-19 pandemic and the implications on both a personal and a global level. When you make the decision to move to another country with your family, ‘Pandemic’ is not something that we added to the list of considerations! But here we are, along with everyone else, trying to sort through the truths, the fear, the panic, and the meaning behind it all. I must admit, it is quite an isolating feeling when the majority of your family and friends are half way across the world, and it’s very difficult to get home. We are so conditioned in our lifetime to be able to just jump on a plane and go home quickly. We’re starting to get a dose of what it was like in our Grandparents era!
Which is perhaps not a bad thing… I started an Instagram account a few years back called ‘Phyllis and Mary’, named after my two Grandmothers. Like most women in their era, they were strong, resilient women with simple old fashioned values like making do with what you have, using manners, recycling, saving, making things by hand, sustainability, and community mindedness. It was 2015, and I felt like the world was becoming so fast paced, and consumer and profit driven, that I wanted to really reflect back on those values and bring them into my everyday. The account was a visual diary and helped me to document all my loves, and find myself again after having 4 babies. On a global scale, I think the world is going to need to find itself again after this pandemic and could use a good dose of these old fashioned values. Things are going to shift like they’ve never shifted before, at least not in my lifetime. We’re all being called to wake up to how we’re treating the planet, how we’re treating each other, and particularly, how we (over)consume. There will be big changes ahead, the road will be rocky, but I think there will be many silver linings. As I’ve written before on my Instagram page @christinadayphotography, I’m hopeful that it will become a much more balanced patriarchal/matriarchal world, one where Mother Nature is respected and revered, and one where we’ll no longer take things for granted in our lives.
Grandparents Phyllis and Kevin
Grandparents Mary and Eugene
But I digressed, back to the now…
How so much can change in one small week. This time last week we were touring the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago and Trump was yet to declare a National Emergency. Today, the Aquarium is closed due to the virus, and the penguins have been let loose to explore. How cute is this:
https://www.instagram.com/p/B9zx-xDD9DL/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link
I’m very grateful we were still able to go on Spring Break, many were not. Thankfully we drove, because this is what Chicago O’Hare airport looked like Saturday night:
So much for social distancing!
The response in the US has seemed lackluster. From articles I’ve read, there was early warning (late January) about the virus in Seattle that was mostly ignored. I won’t go into the specifics here, there are hundreds of articles online detailing the early stages of the “Chinese virus” (as Trump has called it), but there seems to have been a lot of denial, blaming others, calling it another country’s problem, a lack of test kits, etc etc. Finding truth is difficult in a country that is so polarized by the two major political parties who are constantly gunning for each other, but non verbal communication doesn’t lie, and I think we’ve definitely seen a change in the demeanor of the leader of the First World. This is one battle I don’t think he envisaged. Thankfully, it is now being taken extremely seriously.
……………
On return to Memphis, a trip to the store was in order. The following photos were taken at Target, which in the US, sells everything from electronics, clothes, food, and toilet paper. Although not that day. ‘Toiletpapergate’ appears to be a worldwide phenomenon, not just in Australia, although I’ve yet to see two women physically fighting over a 12 pack!
Some items were more popular than others…
The mess created by the additional sanitizing wipes becomes a whole new problem…
Our school is currently out. For how long, we don’t know. I’ve heard of some colleges not going back until September after their summer break (Harvard), 6 months away! Our teachers are diligently preparing learning from home work so that next week, many of us get to add ‘Home School Teacher’ to our resume. I’ve already had one go of that with one child since moving to the US, and it didn’t turn out so well. How am I going to go with 4 of them! Due to our move to another country, our family have all had to make a lot of changes over the last 18 months, so we’re actually probably more equipped to deal with the changes than many others. This is also one time when I’m thankful that there is one stay-at-home-parent to deal with the schooling. So many others are now having to now juggle two jobs, childcare, loss of income, and the myriad of other issues arising with the changes. Our issues are tiny compared to so many others that will lose whole livelihoods.
So, until we get our school work, it currently feels like a normal Spring holiday we would have in Australia with one week of adventure and one week of laying low at home. We started off with some slime making, so we’re already making inroads on our ‘Science’ home school subject!
Next up is the Solar System. More on that next week.
Until then, we’re playing board games, riding bikes, going for walks, reading, listening to music, and appreciating the small things in life. We might even start a vegetable garden if things get dire.
Take care of yourselves, and as they suggest in Texas:
