The tweet shows two silhouettes, extending in familiar policeman shapes. The text is as cheery as a beat-walking bobby in an Edwardian children’s book: “If you think that by going for a picnic in a rural location no one will find you, don’t be surprised if an officer appears from the shadows!” And the message, directed in this case to the inhabitants of Central Bedfordshire in England, is an example of how even when they’re essential, anti-pandemic policies are always at risk of going a little bit insane.
I’m a skeptic, to put it mildly, of the skeptics of lockdowns and social distancing requirements. At best they make an argument for more speed and optimism in reopening, not a case that there’s an alternative world where the U.S. economy stayed open and steady while the virus was killing more people weekly than car crashes, flu or cancer.
The example of the British police hunting down picnickers even – or maybe especially? – when they deliberately head to isolated locales hits particularly close to home for me, because isolated streams and woods have been essential to my own family’s attempts to adapt to social distancing. Every other day, weather permitting, my pregnant wife and I have been dragging our children to one or another Connecticut state park, all of which happily remain open for solo hikers and families.
This is a small example of what adaptation looks like, how people find ways to balance the public health imperative of distancing and the public health imperative of getting exercise and sun. And it’s excellent practice for life after the lockdowns begin to ease.
So officials micromanaging outdoor time and exercise – chivying people out of parks if they’re doing the wrong thing or closing an entire state’s worth of parks – are cracking down on exactly the kind of creative and adaptive behaviors that a socially distanced society ought to be encouraging.
The same point applies to follies like the Michigan governor (and Biden vice-presidential auditioner), Gretchen Whitmer, issuing rules that don’t just distinguish between essential and nonessential businesses, but essential and nonessential products, which led to the strange spectacle of stores like Home Depot staying open but taping off their paint and gardening sections.
The Whitmer rule is particularly daft because an America that successfully adapted to social distancing would be a country with more homeowners doing DIY projects, more people starting backyard gardens and more people making ends meet by picking up work that doesn’t require being indoors – work like, well, landscaping and house painting.
This doesn’t just apply to government policy. The mayor of Louisville, Kentucky, earned a lot of well-deserved flak, and a slap-down in court, for trying to prevent churches from holding drive-in services – not something I’m quite sold on liturgically, but still a creatively adaptive way to achieve semi-normalcy on Sunday morning.
There is an understandable impulse lurking behind these overreaching moves: If we’re going to get the most out of this period of lockdown, to make its benefits worth the ample costs, we obviously want the lockdown to actually happen, to err on the side of safety.
But the rules need to seem reasonable, or else resistance will be normalized. They need to seem timebound and provisional: The governors and mayors making decisions on school closures on an every-few-weeks basis are being smarter than the officials pre-emptively canceling everything from here until July. And the rules need to allow people to be creative in confinement and to practice for the near-future when we’ll live in-between.
So if your lockdown ends up forbidding house painting and gardening and park-going and drive-through church, you’re setting your society up for failure once it ends.
The New York Times