(I said I was done being polite, but I thought this letter was rather restrained.)
June 11, 2020
Dear neighbor,
As you may already know, my father ████ ██████ passed away in early April. He was in a rehabilitation nursing home for what we expected to be a short stay. Sometime around the end of March he apparently contracted COVID-19 from a nurse who picked it up through community transmission. Shortly after my father’s death, several other cases were reported at the same facility.
I have not yet made arrangements for a memorial service because we still don’t know when it will be safe for people to gather in that way. When we eventually have the service, I hope you will consider coming. Jim cared very much about the neighborhood the people who live here.
For me the most difficult aspect of this experience is that his death and many others could have been avoided if there had been a better policy response to the epidemic – i.e. if better decisions had been made and better implementation accomplished at various levels of government. Most notably there was a need for a federal response to the crisis, but that response was absent. It continues to be absent.
- If a proper quarantine had been implemented for individuals who were exposed to the virus in January and February, particularly at our nation’s ports of entry, the chain of transmission probably would not have reached my father in late March.
- If there had been a timely effort to develop and manufacture enough test kits, we would have been able to intercept the nurse who passed the virus to my father.
- If the facts about the virus had been communicated truthfully by our nation’s officials early on, more people and more institutions would have taken better precautions with masks, limitations on crowd sizes, etc. Instead, our highest official chose to hold a rally in Colorado Springs in late February, setting exactly the wrong example and ignoring the risks it imposed on our region.
But “ifs” count for nothing after the damage is done. This is why it matters whom we vote for. There are tangible consequences to having bad leadership, and we are collectively and individually responsible for those consequences – particularly if we had a hand in putting the bad leaders in power, but also if we remained silent in response to bad governance. This spring my family is paying for those consequences. Next it might be your family.
Partly in response to my father’s death, I placed a sign in my yard last Friday stating a political opinion about who bears responsibility for our current state of bad leadership that resulted in such a disastrous response to the virus. I did not expect that everyone would agree with the opinion. However there is no requirement that an opinion must be agreeable in order for someone to express it. That is the most fundamental principle upon which our nation was founded.
Unfortunately, on Saturday morning someone decided that the appropriate response to a disagreeable opinion was to engage in vandalism and theft – to uproot my sign and steal it. That person appointed himself or herself as dictator of what constitutes acceptable speech. They literally tried to take my words away from me. (Don’t worry, I have more words.)
I do not know who stole the sign in lieu of speaking with me about its content. As a result, now I can’t look any of our neighbors in the eyes and feel confident of their trustworthiness. To what lengths will the person go in order to enforce my silence and my compliance next time? Will they further vandalize my yard or my house? Is my dog at risk of being harmed? Am I at risk of being harmed? A person who can justify engaging in small acts of intimidation often finds it easy to escalate to more drastic acts.
I believe that nearly everyone in the neighborhood is more honorable than that, but it saddens me that one of our neighbors is not.
Kind regards,
█████ ██████
█████ ██████████████
Littleton CO