This is it: We are in a time in which we need each other. As I have been saying from day one on the radio, we are all in this together. We are learning how to do things within our family units and with our neighbors that make our lives fuller and more important.
Suddenly in our neighborhood, people are cooking and sharing with their neighbors. We are leaving things on each other’s doorsteps. One of our neighbors, Sophie Banks, a junior at the Putney School, made sourdough bread and sold it, far too cheaply, to support the wonderful People’s Pantry in Great Barrington (see Andrew Blechman’s story about the People’s Pantry here). She did that as a member of the Sibling Bread Collective. Pete Seeger always talked about keeping things local and what we are seeing as a result of this awful, frightening pandemic is an increasing number of neighbors depending on another. It’s about time.
As a kid so many years ago on West 96th Street in New York City, I lived in an apartment building with four apartments on each floor. My parents knew an elderly lady who lived in one of the other apartments. She kept an extra key in case we got locked out. The point is that in all those many, many years, we never knew the people who lived in the other two apartments. Now, as this terrible scourge continues, interdependence grows.
COVID-19 has brought with it some unanticipated problems. A doctor friend of mine runs a large renal medical group and for the last several years, he has worked hard to convince people that rather than going to a dialysis center, they should do dialysis at home. Now comes the coronavirus. Going to the center for dialysis is very risky for many reasons and even doing the procedure at home means getting the equipment and the training, neither of which is easy these days.
We in Great Barrington depend on our wonderful ambulance service as well as the police department, which really must have its hands full. In times like these, we can pretty well expect to see more and more crime, both because people need to eat and because there are always people who take advantage of hard times. Some thieves in our neighborhood have been breaking into and stealing cars. Years ago, because of some threatening calls and letters, we installed a pretty comprehensive security system. It has cameras and spotlights that go on when animals of different species mosey across our little bit of land. Obviously, this is a time when Great Barrington’s largess in building a large police operation should prove justified. Regular patrols of the area are one thing, but crime-solving has become very important. We are now letting people out of jail instead of putting them in, but this doesn’t and shouldn’t mean that we don’t want to catch perpetrators. If we did that, it would signal that people can break the law with impunity.
Gov. Baker is allowing liquor stores to remain open, but marijuana dispensaries have been told to close down. I suppose the best argument for this seeming inconsistency is that there are often long lines outside the pot shops and an awful lot of people are traveling across state lines to get their weed. That is the last thing we want to see happening as we are trying to contain and ultimately put a stop to the virus. The pot people are not happy about this and those who thought that they would be making a lot of money with all the new Massachusetts dispensaries are particularly unhappy as they see their pipe dreams going up in smoke. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist.) Of course, the regular old-fashioned pot dealers must be thanking their lucky stars that what was legal a few months ago is now illegal, just like in the old days.
Or to quote my wonderful friend Linda Ellerbee, “And so it goes.”
