#screw Murphy and Whitmer alike

[gettothestabbing]

Personal: Rona Season

I’m so frustrated. I am trying not to be a complaining person, and I am very grateful for what I do have right now. I still have a job, a place to live, supportive family, sweet cats that I have the means to care for, a car, and so on. But, that being said, I’m really losing my mind over the ‘new normal’ at work.

During our shift, we got another ‘Updates” email. They extended all these new policies (including the one that requires me to self-isolate, meaning I can’t go to a store or anywhere besides work, and I may exercise outside as long as I don’t enter any buildings) until June 30th. Which means I am going to have to give in and buy food from my employer because they won’t LET me go to stores and I can’t afford to get food delivered (aside from occasionally).

The option to buy food from them has been present since the start of lockdown, but I resisted. I had enough meat and rice to be okay. If they had lifted this policy on June 7th, the previous deadline, I would have made it. It was my one way to resist what increasingly feels like authoritarian measures from both my employer and New Jersey’s government. And now I can’t, and it makes me so furious it’s been all I can think about since I got the email. 

The food at work is alright - it’s certainly not rotten or badly made - but I cherish my independence and my practice of cooking. I’ve been buying higher and higher quality food since living on my own, and this feels like a forcible downgrade back to being a child who doesn’t get to make her own decisions.

It’s bad enough that, despite us being a Christian Scientist facility, no one seems to think or talk of anything but the virus. I grew up in this church/movement, and I have NEVER seen behavior like this about ANY disease, injury, or physical threat. Christian Scientists are very prayerful people, generally calm, polite, even unflappable in their demeanor. It’s something I admire and have to some degree myself. But only a facade of it remains.

And it’s not that the people I work with are paralyzed by fear of the virus - although perhaps some secretly are, after all the fear around them for months now - but there’s a self-defensive fear that won’t go away. Over and over, both the church and my employer justify their strict new policies as following our founder’s command to obey the letter of the law and Jesus’ call to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s. 

I feel that the spirit of their obedience is really based in fear: fear that if we didn’t abide by every single regulation, we would be shamed and shunned, seen as anti-science and anti-health. It’s a big fear in our church, one that’s at least partially justified by the 1990s cases of parents whose children passed on in CS care. We seek exemptions, religious freedom, freedom to practice our system of prayer and healing, yet if we can’t obtain these exemptions, the line is, “We don’t need to fear vaccines. They can’t harm us. So just get them if there’s no way to avoid them.” I don’t disagree with the theological logic behind that, but as a conservative, it makes me so frustrated and upset to see my church roll over for anything the state says. 

And I can’t talk to almost anyone about the intersection of my politics and faith because there is so little overlap between them. The few conservatives/Republicans I’ve known at work, I can’t meet with anymore, because we all work in different buildings and different times! (Naturally, they’re also all a few decades older than me and so have my principles but no understanding of conservative media/Internet beyond watching Fox. But they were better than nothing!) The only person I’ve really been able to discuss such things with is my sister, who I’m trying not to burden right now because this is just so much worse for her, who just graduated and lost all her job prospects to the Rona, possibly for the next few years too, and because frankly she’s heard it all from me before.

My hope at the end of a tunnel is finishing this online training, doing the in-person stuff (which will be very difficult and scary for me, but it’s important), and moving back to Michigan. Even though Rona has made Whitmer turn Michigan into some strange authoritarian hell, it’s still where my dad lives, where my cats can go outside into a safe yard, and where I can get a job that doesn’t confine me to two buildings and the sidewalks of my neighborhood. It’s also the place I can start building my life, like buying a house and resuming my attempts to date, because I couldn’t do either of those things effectively here even if I wanted to make a life in New Jersey. But it seems so far away, and the class has no set schedule anymore because my classmate’s schedule is chaos, and I wish I could do something to make some of this pressure go away.