Are you essential or non-essential?
You can start a food fight with a question like that. Some businesses, charities, church, civic and commercial leaders have gotten unusually prickly with their answers. Being on the coveted list of essential goods and services connotes importance and worth. Fighting to stay on it does too. If you're not on the approved list then you and whatever you were busy doing two weeks ago aren't as important as what other people still get to do. By short extension that must mean you aren't as important either. Others may, you may not.
There's a lot about this virus nobody knows, but here's what's certain: we are dealing with something ugly enough to kill people. It's treacherous and cowardly and seems, predator-like to pick on the weakest and most vulnerable. If the softest of soft targets get caught by this viral jackal pack, say, your grandparents, the kindly older neighbors that wave as you're leaving for work, the co-worker who's been out on medical leave, the guy recovering from chemotherapy - they will die.
What's not well known is the transmission rate or where it's headed next. It might kill a lot of people you know who need to stay around a while longer. The best we can do for now is stay away from each other. That's it.
I'm noticing the businesses, non-profits, stores, drive-throughs, charities, churches, media outlets, government services and civic associations that are staying open when they don't really have to stay open. Switching to skeleton crews when dealing with a nasty, hyper-contagious virus is hardly a show of good faith either. Against good wisdom you're still mingling people who have been around different sets of people and will return to them - maybe with a very bad bug. Somebody in those unnecessarily interlocking chains might be sick.
I'm getting pretty good at quarantining and doing without lately and when this thing is over, I'm not going to have much to do with greedy outfits and tedious people who made a grab for the brass ring of importance by staying in business when they could have politely shuttered like we did and helped the rest of us out.
Jockeying for essential status is enough to make me sick.
