Who Will Answer?

If the soul is darkened
By a fear it cannot name,
If the mind is baffled
When the rules don't fit the game,
Who will answer? Who will answer? Who will answer?

(Copyright Ames Ed Lyrics)

Good question. And since I’ve been asking uncomfortable questions this week, I might as well pose this one.

I keep hearing that most flubies will stay home, hunker down, and try to wait the pandemic out. Yet . . . I also hear they are hoping for some food deliveries in between waves, a vaccine to be created, produced, and distributed, and even hope that some semblance of law and order will be maintained. There are hopes some form of medical care will be preserved. There are hopes that utilities, water, sewer, electric, and gas will be maintained, or at least partially so. Who will pick up the trash? Or dead bodies? To do these, and many other things necessary during a pandemic, it will require people willing to go out in a pandemic and work.

So I ask? Who will answer?

Are we expecting someone else to do the job? Expecting someone else to risk their lives, but not ourselves? What happens when they fall sick, or simply quit out of fear, or from being overwhelmed by the amount of work and the lack of help? Replacements will be needed. Again. Who will answer?

If a pandemic lasts two years, can any of us really SIP that long? If everything stops for two years, things might take five years more to return to some semblance of normal. We could see famine, secondary diseases, and a host of other complications. Can you survive seven years? Or maybe ten?

Is our own skin that much more precious to us than it is to the guy next door or across town? What if he won’t do it? What if the number of people willing to work, and do the essential things during a pandemic, falls dreadfully short of what is needed? What if, due to fear, we let everything collapse? How long can we last sitting on a mountain of rice and beans, guarding them with a shotgun?

I know everyone who intends to hide has an excuse, a justification. They believe its alright to let some other poor bastard go out and risk dying, just not themselves. Those that take that tack had better hope they are in the minority, otherwise they may find that all they’ve done is prolong their agony.

Who will answer?

I don't know. But somebody damn well better.

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