Risky thaw ahead.
Sunday, April 26th, 2020
It was the day after March 12th when I tossed a montage of US newspaper headlines up here to give you some impression of the impact of the crazy seven previous days. Stocks plummeted. “Outbreak begins to upend life” across the country.
One week later, March 20th, it was lockdown lockdown closing, schools closed, and a sense of no real plan emerging from the White House.
Then, on March 27th, I found a common theme in cases, deaths, and unemployment claims skyrocketing to gargantuan numbers.
It’s Sunday night, late April, a day short of one month after that last link. Barely 30 days!
And the headlines (shown above) have the affect of a shell-shocked soldier peering cautiously up out of the trench. States are “weighing” reopening (here in Georgia, that calculation has been made, and personally we have pretty much doubled down on isolation in the face of ill-informed bravado.) The AJC reports on rural Georgia hospitals, ill-equipped and victims of consolidation even before the pandemic. They are worrying for sure.
Experts ponder how to create a ‘fortress’ to protect employees. The candidates are not campaigning at all in traditional ways. It just sounds so fragile.
The ‘Risky thaw ahead’ headline came on a day where we heard from our friends up in the upper peninsula of Michigan, perched on the north edge of a lake that is only now starting to thaw substantially. You wouldn’t want to just blindly march out there. Perfect.
I came downstairs this morning asking Sammy if there was any way we could just fast-forward 30 days. I knew the answer, of course. We can see May on the horizon, but it’s ours to get through.
