Can We Really Romp Outside of Our Kennels?

MSNBC’s Chris Hayes says we’re headed for “normal-ish” life again (even as the nation passes the grim half-million dead mark). The Atlantic agrees, predicting that summer in America will be “near normal.” Over one and a half million Americans are being vaccinated against Covid-19 each day, and millions more carry the antibodies. Most of the people in my aging group have received at least one shot, and the frontline health care workers in my family have all been fully immunized. My wife Camille and I have begun talking about expanding our social bubble for the first time in nearly a year. We’re begun blinking in the sunlight, like miners trapped below for seeming forever.

But… it’s too soon, folks, to go crazy. And yesterday, on a sunny, breathtaking afternoon on Crissy Field in San Francisco (see my photo below), people WERE going crazy. Fully half of the men, women and children crowding the walk/bike paths of this popular Bayside park had abandoned their masks, including many sweating joggers who went huffing-puffing by us as we strolled. At one juncture on the scenic path, a group of middle-aged, unmasked people had congregated to chat in one another’s faces, merrily oblivious to the fact that they were blocking all foot traffic.

Now I don’t like to stereotype the Covid-clueless — but, hell, here goes. Many of the unmasked who went yakking by us on their dumb phones were Marina types — what we used to call yuppies. Self-centered, shallow, youngish men and women who don’t think twice about breathing heavily all over someone else. Then there were the Pacific Heights types — the wealthy, entitled, middle-aged men and women who were probably inoculated by their private physicians back in early January, ahead of nursing home residents and ER workers. This was the type idly congregating on the footpath yesterday so you couldn’t get by without squeezing against them. When I snarled something angry at one of them through my mask, she simply stared disdainfully at me like staying socially distant was MY problem.

Worst of all, you can’t simply reject these people as stupid MAGA zealots. They’re San Franciscans, for god’s sake, and they’re supposed to know better.

So what are we to do with these uncaring, unsocial people as we stagger towards normality? Public health officials keep warning us that we need to keep observing pandemic guidelines for the foreseeable future. But the Covid-clueless stopped giving a shit about public health, if they EVER cared about it, long ago. Particularly on sunny afternoons on Crissy Field. This is federal land, owned by and for the people of the United States. But too many treat it as their exclusive backyard — a gift bestowed on the rest of us by the billionaires who live next door.

As San Francisco basked in bathtub weather yesterday, the city did indeed seem like an idyllic oasis. But there is trouble even in paradise.