What essential means
What do we really need in a world turned upside down? As local governments hand down stay-at-home orders, the word of the day is “essential.” What were merely suggestions to businesses to shut down and people to shut in are now firm directions, with fines attached. What’s still permissible depends on what’s indispensable. And what’s indispensable—well, some might agree to disagree.
Hospitals, clinics and pharmacies are the easy ones, because this is a pandemic and because humans require care even in the best of times. Exempting veterinarians is also an easy call; someone has to be around to pump the dog’s stomach after he eats several chocolate bars while Dad is trapped in a remote work crisis. Social services have to remain, too.
Then there’s infrastructure. We’d rather not emerge from hibernation to discover that the nation has literally decayed around us; metaphorical collapse is rough enough.
Food is stickier (especially when hoarders have snatched up all the paper towels at Safeway). Obviously we’ll wither without sustenance, and obviously not everyone has the time, money or flour supply to spend 14 hours a day baking ancient-grain sourdoughs or simmering beef stew, so grocery stores must keep their doors open.
But we won’t wither without a three-course $45-per-person prix fixe takeaway meal from a
Michelin-starred restaurant, and that’s what at least one D.C. mainstay among the many outlets exempted from to-go closure requirements is offering.
And dry cleaning? Why does any white-collar office-worker even need to put on pants for these days?
Some might question the essential-ness of liquor stores, too, except for making the perfect quarantini—though plenty of folks probably feel as though they need a drink amid this mess, to say nothing of severe alcoholics who might go into withdrawal if suddenly cut off.
Considerations like these are a reason to ask the question: When we say “essential,” what do we mean? There’s what individuals need to survive physically, and what they need to survive mentally, or emotionally, or spiritually, or however else you refer to what’s in our heads and hearts.
Or perhaps there’s another option, or at least another hope: that we’re sacrificing what doesn’t feel essential right now because it’s the only way to recover everything later.
There’s a contradiction in the distancing that has become doctrine for responsible citizens these past few weeks. Going it alone, it turns out, is actually the most social thing we could possibly do.
Maybe when this is over, we’ll keep more of a distance than we did before, because we’ve had so much practice. Or maybe we’ll have learned that what we really need is each other.