Joelle's Journal
By Joelle Gendzel
By Joelle Gendzel
While covering an event recently, a student made a comment I found very interesting. “Aren’t you guys tired of COVID yet,” he joked. My answer, obviously, is overwhelmingly “yes.” I would assume most of us would never choose to live through a deadly virus killing thousands of people across the country every day and requiring everyone to cease non-essential activities for nearly a year now. I certainly wouldn’t.
Living this way is exhausting for everyone, not to mention the millions of healthcare workers fighting the battle against a deadly pandemic every day. It seems incredibly easy for someone like myself to decide that I am done with this. To return seeing groups of friends on the weekend, leaving the house without a mask, and ignoring all the precautions we have been urged to take but are not always faced with immediate visible consequences for not taking.
At least until yourself or a family member falls ill, that is.
This one short conversation seems to perfectly illustrate the way so many of us have dealt with feelings of exhaustion and frustration with the pandemic- by simply pretending that, more or less, COVID is over. Using online school as an opportunity to see friends more, only wearing masks when required to enter a store, ignoring distancing rules. Not denying the existence of a killer virus circulating through the community, but pretending that the threat is over once our attention span for dealing with it has expired. The temptation for adopting this approach is obvious and even understandable. But it also perfectly illustrates how easily we disregard the lives of others when the blood isn’t immediately on our hands.
As we approach the one year mark of school closing and California’s statewide Intensive Care Unit bed capacity reaches 0%, I urge us all to reconsider. If we can look beyond our current exhaustion with sacrificing much of our lives, I hope we can begin to recognize how, in a way, our actions determine who lives and who dies.
Living this way is exhausting for everyone, not to mention the millions of healthcare workers fighting the battle against a deadly pandemic every day. It seems incredibly easy for someone like myself to decide that I am done with this. To return seeing groups of friends on the weekend, leaving the house without a mask, and ignoring all the precautions we have been urged to take but are not always faced with immediate visible consequences for not taking.
At least until yourself or a family member falls ill, that is.
This one short conversation seems to perfectly illustrate the way so many of us have dealt with feelings of exhaustion and frustration with the pandemic- by simply pretending that, more or less, COVID is over. Using online school as an opportunity to see friends more, only wearing masks when required to enter a store, ignoring distancing rules. Not denying the existence of a killer virus circulating through the community, but pretending that the threat is over once our attention span for dealing with it has expired. The temptation for adopting this approach is obvious and even understandable. But it also perfectly illustrates how easily we disregard the lives of others when the blood isn’t immediately on our hands.
As we approach the one year mark of school closing and California’s statewide Intensive Care Unit bed capacity reaches 0%, I urge us all to reconsider. If we can look beyond our current exhaustion with sacrificing much of our lives, I hope we can begin to recognize how, in a way, our actions determine who lives and who dies.