On a bench next to my front door, I keep a bag filled to bursting with masks; aging cloth masks have given way to industrial looking N95s and KF94s stuffed in alongside children's masks from Korea that pop out of the package like elegant origami cranes. |
These days the collection might seem superfluous. After all, schools and shops and gyms are mask free. But I am holding onto ours; they are still a means of safe passage through the world. My family is among the vulnerable. |
My now 13-year-old daughter, Orli, received a liver transplant as part of her cancer treatment on March 4, 2020. When she emerged from the hospital some weeks later, it was to an emptied city and isolation. She was high risk, of course, but, in the pre-vaccine months of Covid, so was everyone else — particularly other cancer patients, the elderly, the asthmatic, the diabetic, the pregnant. |
By that summer, when our family began to carefully socialize again, masks were not political, they were practical. And almost every meeting was outdoors. Having spent the early weeks of Orli's cancer explaining our precarity to all we came into contact with, it was almost a relief to share this space of understanding. We were no longer total outliers. |
But this spring, as we reached the two year mark of the pandemic and Covid precautions fell across the country, it seemed that the immunocompromised, as well as children too young for vaccines and their family members, were all but forgotten in the joyful rush to return to "normal." |
As rules changed, I began to think we were missing an opportunity for a social reset, one that considered a new normal, taking into consideration the needs of everyone, rather than leaving some in isolation forever. And, as I wrote in an essay this weekend, I searched for some answers. For several weeks, I spent time talking to public health experts and philosophers about what society owes those of us still at risk. |
"As a society, we have never been willing to look directly and fully at those who are vulnerable, and to accept how our unthinking and careless everyday actions impact them," Alice MacLachlan, a professor of philosophy at York University in Toronto, told me by email. "It's not that we have consciously decided to sacrifice our most vulnerable (in the pandemic or the past) but," she added, we don't even admit to ourselves that we are "saying our convenience and impatience and longing for normal matters more than your life, and health and safety." |
Here's what we're focusing on today: |
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