Shelter in Place

I am privileged in the real sense.

My wife and I are riding it out in my mother's summer cottage. My mother is away. Our college age daughter is safely isolated at home in our city apartment. The refrigerator is well stocked with our favorite food. We watch movies, we telecommute, we watch and listen to music videos, we take long walks in the wooded surroundings and we sleep...a lot.

Lurking outside our door is the biggest crisis we've ever witnessed. The sense of doom permeates the land as the numbers of those infected and the dead rises every day, both at home and around the world. Like most people, we dread, with every sniffle, that we are infected.

My decades of involvement in politics fill me with fear as the economy shuts down and civil liberties are cast aside in response to the real emergency. We are afraid to look at our retirement account, which reflects decades of work and savings, and we worry about relatives and friends in business who have been shuttered.

We hope that enough Americans understand the constitutional principles that have under-girded our society, principles that we have, until now, taken for granted. Do enough Americans understand these principles well enough to insure that they are restored and re-asserted after the crisis? Time will tell.

In the meantime, let's stay safe. One lesson that should be learned is that we should all be prepared, going forward, for any crisis by stocking up on essentials to survive for at least 4-6 weeks. We need to learn a new level of self-sufficiency and the value of individual and family autonomy.