Column
America Is Now Divided Into Places I Trust and Places I Don’t
The family vacation in Covid mode is a fraught, joyful, and terrifying experience
I’m at the beach right now. I am no longer home. The other night, I slept in a bed other than my own for the first time since February, when I went to Europe on assignment for a magazine and got back to America just under the wire. My wife and kids hadn’t slept away from home since Christmas. We had been on lockdown all spring, dreaming of it ending one day. In my mind, I had visions of a vaccine or a miracle cure quickly coming to market and wiping out all of my newly acquired germophobia, allowing me to roam the world as I pleased.
Those miracles have yet to come to pass. But America has more or less charged ahead and reopened anyway, abandoning coronavirus prevention. This is because we are impatient, jealous, and ignorant. Also, since the Trump administration never bothered to hand down a national order to, say, wear masks, our national quarantine has been overseen by a hodgepodge of governors and mayors with conflicting interests and varying intellects. That’s resulted in places like Georgia — which is batshit insane — hanging a “mission accomplished” banner across a Covid-19 spore and reopening itself in an act of collective suicide. Even…
