It's a tribute to how disrupted the normal patterns of my life are at the moment, that I failed to post this on it's sheduled Monday (though I did remember I needed to at several points in the day). As of last Wednesday, I'm under direction to work from home until this whole pandemic thing sorts itself out. I have the privilege and good fortune not only of having a job that can be performed in this way, but in having an employer who was ahead of the curve in setting up guidelines and structures, not only to comply with what is now a government mandate, but to protect our supply chain and patient-customers. (We produce biologically based pharmaceuticals. It isn't a production line you can stop and re-start arbitrarily. And even an unplanned shutdown of a couple of months would mean failing to provide our customers with lifesaving medications.)
On the one hand, not spending 1.5-2 hours commuting every day is giving me time to get some household projects done that usually get crammed into weekends. Even under our current "shelter in place" directive, there's an allowance for getting out for exercise as long as social distancing is maintained. I've taken up a routine bike ride on my lunch hour. And I have sufficient supplies that I haven't had to expose myself to grocery-hunting crowds in this initial realignment phase.
But it's a scary and unsettling age we live in. I'm not sure anyone can foresee what the long-term consequences of this pandemic will be on social and political structures. We can hope that there's a lesson to be learned about collective action for the collective good, and about how infrastructure that protects the poorest and most vulnerable is actually in the selfish self-interest of even the wealthy and powerful. Maybe there's a lesson about how intersecting the groups "wealthy" and "powerful" so completely is part of what got us here in the first place. Do I sound like a radical? Probably not as radical as I should be. I long to be able to do something concrete to support those who don't have the advantages my specific employment gives me. I comfort myself that while I may not be directly supporting Covid19 health care, I do support vital health care in my everyday job. But outside of that, the only concrete things I seem to be able to do is targeted shopping at small businesses who don't have reserves to fall back on. (I'm still feeling uncertain about the risk involved in ording take-out from small food service businesses whose employees may not be able to afford to admit health risks.)
In any event, here is your regular weekly Lesbian Historic Motif Project blog. A day late, but never a dollar short.
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