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At that time, I knew panicked people who wouldn\u2019t even drive through the Castro District. I also met Alice, a masseuse who reached out to stigmatized, isolated AIDS patients, offering massages to relieve the \u201cskin hunger\u201d that results from being deprived of human touch. I stood somewhere in between those poles. Driving Mrs. Bieda around town felt feeble but at least a step in the right direction.<\/p>\n
It was only after David died that I began thinking about gay co-workers who had disappeared, uncounted. About why a whole community didn\u2019t count with the powers that be; Reagan was president for five years during the epidemic before he even publicly mentioned AIDS.<\/p>\n
Coronavirus, with its thousands of counted and undercounted victims, brings back echoes of that dark era.<\/p>\n
This time, I\u2019m part of the group counted most vulnerable, and most expendable. I understand triage: If the doctor had too few respirators and too many patients, I\u2019d take the Sophie\u2019s Choice away and tell her to give the life-saving gear to a nurse, or a child.<\/p>\n
But I\u2019m not willing to die for Wall Street. I\u2019m incensed at politicians who say I should. I\u2019m even more offended by \u201cliberation\u201d protesters. If they\u2019d be willing to forego medical care after catching the virus, fine. But that\u2019s not how it works, and it\u2019s not just their lives they\u2019re endangering; it\u2019s nurses and doctors who already face the grim choice of exposing their own families or isolating in hotel rooms.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve been self-quarantined for six weeks. I\u2019m jousting with depression, worn out from being the sole, shut-in caretaker for an 89-year-old who, because of cognitive and short-term memory issues, doesn\u2019t understand quarantine procedures. He thinks I\u2019m bossy, bloody-minded about having \u201cthe last word.\u201d I risk the quarrel, knowing that the stakes might be having him in isolation, exchanging our actual last words by telephone.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m lucky: I have a home in which to isolate. My cat does his head-butting best to combat my loneliness and skin hunger. I can still take distanced walks. So far, social security and IRA distributions have enabled me to order from local restaurants and donate to nonprofits.<\/p>\n
Millenials have recently dubbed coronavirus the \u201cBoomer Remover.\u201d Though cruelly ageist, that slur pales in comparison with what gay men suffered during the 1980s. Still, this crisis \u2014 like AIDS and like last year\u2019s wildfires \u2014 is acting as a stess-test, measuring whether \u201cwe the people\u201d are interconnected enough to survive: as towns, as states, as a united body of states, as a species.<\/p>\n
Coronavirus has revealed flaws and inequities that underlie this country\u2019s notion of \u201cnormal.\u201d Perilous inequalities \u2014 urban versus rural, salaried versus hourly and gig workers, white death rates versus the disproportionate tolls for African-Americans and Native-American \u2014 are being laid bare. It\u2019s now easier to see how the lack of paid sick leave \u2014 for grocery, pharmacy and other \u201cessential workers\u201d \u2014 constitutes a threat to national security, and why tying health care to jobs exposes not just individuals, but all of us, to peril.<\/p>\n
I believe, as Wendell Berry has said, \u201cthat the community \u2014 in the fullest sense: a place and all its creatures \u2014 is the smallest unit of health.\u201d As he said, \u201cto speak of individual health outside that context is meaningless.\u201d<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t believe that the jet-setting, sleep-deprived, self-obsessed \u201cnormal\u201d we had before this pandemic could be counted as anything resembling healthy, or sustainable.<\/p>\n
When we recover, when we restart, my prayer is that we seek a healthier, more-sustainable norm. I pray we strive for the balance William Ellery Channing articulated a century ago: \u201cto live content with small means; to seek elegance rather than luxury and refinement rather than fashion \u2026 to be worthy, not respectable, and wealthy, not rich \u2026 to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious, grow up through the common.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nicolette Toussaint lives in Carbondale. Her column appears monthly in the Post Independent and at postindependent.com.<\/p>\n
via:: Post Independent<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"David Steven Bieda was cute, sassy, and so vain. He\u2019d primp before multiple mirrors in his hair salon, saying in broad Brooklynese, \u201cI\u2019m never gonna let MYSELF get old and frumpy.\u201d He didn\u2019t. David died at 37 in 1988. His was my first AIDS death, the first of too many to count. I last saw […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[160],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1319611","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-local-news"],"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-09-04 00:55:44","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KSKE Ski Country","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1319611","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1319611"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1319611\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1319611"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1319611"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1319611"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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