It occurred to me today that I might be a coward, and I didn’t know until now.

Call me crazy, but I don’t want to go out, as my state’s restrictions start to ease. I’m not interested in traveling all over tarnation just for the fun of it. I don’t want to get close to people if I haven’t been close to them for the past ten weeks.

I think I would rather stay inside and see what happens to those people who are running around like chickens with their heads cut off after what amounted to a pittance of time under quarantine. Am I wrong? Am I the only one thinking that it really wasn’t that bad, to have to be isolated from the world for a while?

To be honest, I kind of liked it (but don’t tell anyone).

Of course, my wife and I have both been working from home, and our children have been safely at home with us, and we haven’t been adversely affected by the pandemic in the same way that many people have. I can certainly understand people wanting to get out from under the quarantine so that they can do what’s necessary for them to survive.

But, something tells me that it’s not the case that all of these people are now running around, fighting for their survival.

Does anyone reading this know what a red shirt is? If you’re a Star Trek fan, you probably do (and if you are, check out THIS POST about Spock and Kirk). The red shirts, in the original Star Trek series, from the late 60s, were the no-name crew members of the Enterprise, wearing red shirts, who were bound to be dead by the end of the episode. They would get beamed down to the planet first, or they would end up reporting to an emergency somewhere on the Enterprise first, and BAM! Dead red shirts. You didn’t know about them as characters, so you really didn’t care.

Is it wrong of me to agree with George Takei (Lieutenant Sulu), thinking of the people running out into the post-quarantine world as ‘red shirts’? I think I’ll watch the numbers and the red shirts before I start making decisions about what my family’s going to be doing out in public in the near future.

Am I a coward? I think some people around me, watching me, so reserved in my return to the world, would say I am a coward. They talk about how contagious COVID-19 is and how low the mortality rate is and I think about the numbers that I’ve been focusing on: approximately 350,000 people dead worldwide, more than a quarter of those deaths occurring in my country. I think about the word “asymptomatic” and how dangerous it is that people are carriers of the virus and they don’t even know it.

I prefer to think of my approach as caution.

But, as I often say, extremes are to be avoided and “in medio stat virtus”. So, the other extreme, I suppose is the hermit who would stay inside until the coast is clear and the vaccine becomes available. I understand that this extreme is as unfortunate as the other.

So, we find a middle ground, I guess, by doing what we need to do, out in the world, while also taking precautions to protect ourselves and each other. My wife made masks, along with some of the other ladies in our church, and each of the five of us in our family has a couple of different masks to use and we’ve been washing our hands more often and we’ve been maintaining a social distance from other people when we do go out.

But here’s where I start to get a little nervous all over again –> I think at this point, I am more afraid of other people than I am afraid of the virus. The virus is going to do what the virus is going to do, but the people who carry that virus around and aren’t doing anything to keep others from being infected makes me start to question humanity. Stack on top of that the people I know who are making mask-wearing a political issue and who think that the virus is a hoax and who think that those of us who are concerned are sheep being controlled by some overarching conspiracy.

They scare me more than the virus does.

Maybe, we should all be more scared of humanity than we are of this virus? How’s that for being extremist?

I mean, how many people have died as victims of hate crimes in America? How many people have been murdered in America? How many senseless deaths have happened in America because of the conscious choices of humans who shouldn’t have gone so far?

Maybe we are the virus.