Check Your Privilege And Appreciate Your Quarantine
As I write to you on Day 20 of My Coronavirus Quarantine, I can tell you one thing I’ve learned so far: this is not easy. Being someone who is used to having a daily schedule that assigns something to do for practically every hour of my day, this, of course, feels foreign. However, I have made the conscious choice to stop complaining about it and capitalize on the luxuries I have while stuck in my house. Here’s why you should too.
If you’ve turned on the news at any point in the last three weeks, you would know that our country is in its worst state in decades. First of all, our economy has collapsed entirely and left six million people unemployed (at time of publication). These are breadwinners for households, and people in our backyards that we might not have even noticed. For instance, the Marcus Jewish Community Center of Atlanta, a massive enterprise with over 500 employees, announced last week that they will be laying off and furloughing over half their staff and that it’s likely there will be more to come. The owner of a bakery near my house confided in a friend that everything they have worked for to launch their small business has absolutely disappeared. Pretty much every company in the country right now is asking big questions about how they will survive this, and one of the sacrifices will likely be letting people go. Millions of families across the countries are therefore losing their sources of income and genuinely do not know how they will make it through this.
This isn’t even the medical aspect of this, either. The United States’ Coronavirus case count continues growing exponentially every day and is hitting new records in deaths too. Pretty much everyone knows someone who “has it” and if you don’t, you sadly will within a week. Loved ones in hospital beds are saying goodbye to family members over Facetime. 18 wheelers have been transformed into portable morgues, refrigerated and waiting for bodies. The elderly wave through the windows of their nursing homes to their loved ones, many of them confused and forgetful of the situation they’re in. Healthcare workers are working 12 hour shifts, completely exhausted, with bruised faces from the N95 masks they’ve been wearing for weeks because of supply shortages. And this is only the beginning. It’s estimated that 40-70% of the population will contract this disease. It’s only a matter of time when practically everyone you know has it.
At the end of the day, what you’ve been asked to do is nothing. You’ve been asked to alter your lifestyle for the benefit of the population. It’s sad you won’t see your friends for months. It sucks that maybe your senior year was cut short, and you won’t get to wear your dream prom dress and walk across the Galloway gym barefoot. However, in my opinion, these inconveniences are not worth being upset for weeks compared to the global scope of this loss. It may be difficult, and that’s okay, but at the end of the day, you will be just fine.
Instead of feeling down, take this as a time to refresh and appreciate your lifestyle. In the grand scheme of things, your problems are smaller than you think.