Inconvenience in the time of pandemic
- Melissa Herrera: Not Waiting for Friday
- May 18, 2020
- 2233
Oppression isn’t having to wear a mask. Having to wear a mask is an inconvenience. Oppression is going for a jog and never coming back.
I know you don’t know about the talk. I didn’t until we had children. I understood my husband’s way of teaching our children about the world they lived in was to talk about appearance first, then behavior.
Our children, when we readied for church, school or out to eat in a restaurant, knew to ask if we were dressing up. This meant absolutely no T-shirts or anything sloppy. They knew to come down in their nicest clothing or they’d have to march back upstairs and change.
I admit I used to grow weary of this neat-as-a-pin rule. It took me way longer as a white mother to mixed-race children to understand the meaning behind this rule. My shame burns brightly at my failing.
If you’re not Anglo, then your starting point in any situation means having to do double the work before you even get to the starting point everyone else is waiting at. Our children needed to have those first steps done: neat hair, clean clothes and a face scrubbed so hard it shone.
Behind every single multi-racial person and their success story is a parent or parent figure who laid down the truth of this in the talk: appearance, behavior, tone of speech. These are the parameters that have been laid out for hundreds and hundreds of years. I don’t make the rules, and they can’t be argued with if you haven’t lived inside the truth of them.
In the past several weeks, the furor to restart the economy has grown to a merciless din. There have been cries of lost freedoms and rights and places opening against the rules that were put in place. There have been officials that said they would look the other way instead of enforcing rules, instead of having people comply with the rules.
The replies praising this defiance of rules suggests to me the rules only apply to some. Maybe the ones that do double the work to get anywhere and wear hoodies at night on a walk or play in a park or are involved in a traffic stop need comply with the rules in the strictest possible sense — no sudden movements, please.
I’ve recently heard there are growing numbers of COVID-19 cases in local meat-packing plants. This isn’t surprising considering the close proximity the employees must work in, as well as being deemed essential workers to keep meat products pumping throughout the country.
Unfortunately, from two separate places I’ve heard comments that make me pause, really and truly stop in my tracks, from the sheer meaning of the words: “Well, those people that work there live really close together in their houses so of course they’re going to get it.” As well as, “Only the people that work in the plants are getting it, not the regular people that live in town.”
I must tell you those words took my breath away, the dividing of people into groups that matter and those that don’t: regular/nonregular.
In Greece, where my daughter has been unable to return home from because of the travel restrictions, they aren’t allowed to go outside without signing an affidavit as to why. Those restrictions are easing somewhat, but for weeks on end they were not allowed to go to the grocery store without permission. No one complained that their rights were being infringed upon; they did what the officials said and helped keep the coronavirus numbers down.
Complying with the rules helps everyone. Maybe if we ever really had our rights taken away, we wouldn’t be able see it for what it is because we’ve been too busy complaining about the tiny things instead of seeing the bigger picture.