Finger- pointing is not going to solve the health problems we are facing or will be facing in the next few months as the pandemic sweeps from both coasts into the midlands. And it won’t do any good after the Coronavirus runs its course. We have serious problems and we can’t afford to waste time blaming this person or that country if we’re going to overcome those problems. So enough of the name-calling and blame-shifting already.

Things aren’t happening to other people They’re happening to us. And that’s what’s so unsettling. The Coronavirus isn’t something happening only in some distant countries. It might be next door. It might even be in our house and we don’t know it.

It’s not a tsunami at some remote Pacific Island, a tornado in another town, a flood in another state, or even a fire down the block.

It’s……somewhere. Close. Everywhere, maybe. It’s even making the stock market sick.

My friend Joe, a retired homicide cop, lamented at the YMCA before it closed indefinitely that back in the day he could see who might shoot at him and he could do something about it. But this Coronavirus, well, this is something impossible to relate to because we’ve never experienced anything like it. It is forcing us to become patient in a short-attention-span world.

Joe and I and several other friends at the Y all fall into the demographic group that this virus likes to hit. We like to think that our regular activities on the machines and with the weights and on the walking track make us a LITTLE more bulletproof.

But who knows?

The YMCA and the church are the main social outlets for several of us retired folks. Our church is doing worship services on its Facebook page instead of in the sanctuary now. The only activity still going on is our food pantry distributions. When we all left the Y for the last time before it closed, we didn’t know when we’d see each other again. This virus is shrinking our world, generally and personally. One good thing is that the weather is warm enough that we can at least go outside and walk about the block or something and at least breathe outside air—when it’s not raining.

Our fortunes are becoming unfortunate, something that didn’t happen in the Spanish Influenza era when retirement plans, health savings accounts, and insurance were not so much a part of life.

There is a choice to be made—people or the economy.   We can always rebuild the economy, though it might take more time that we wish. But we can’t rebuild the people we will lose if our leaders who think the economy is the key to their continued employment choose to make people more vulnerable and less valuable than the numbers on the stock market. The health of my body is more important than the health of someone’s portfolio.

We already are past the finger-pointing stage. It matters not where this outbreak began. What matter is how it is ended. Blaming others for the start of a crisis that we must help end is not an excuse for disarray in combatting it.

When this ends, as it will, there will be much room for a national soul-searching with the understanding that talk is cheap and the protections, treatments, and cures will require financial commitment based on our responsibility to be our brother’s and sister’s keeper.

Will this change us? It better change us. It already has, in fact.