I’m a stay- at- home COVID conservative

My caution is drawing judgment from friends

I have taken so many chances in my life, chances I probably should not have taken, that my mom always said I didn’t have sense enough to be afraid.

I moved all over by myself and did things for work that completely sane people might not have done, but to me at least they were all for something. Slept under bridges, chased a mass murderer, climbed under a desk during an earthquake in El Salvador so I could finish filing my story. Knocked on doors in the projects at all hours looking for witnesses, followed a story subject into a crack house in the Bronx where guns were drawn, and in just the past couple of years took two reporting trips to South Sudan, the country where the most humanitarian workers are being killed in a very stupid war, not that there are any smart ones.

So does it bother me that I’m suddenly seen as a house cat by some of my friends because I’m taking no chances with this coronavirus pandemic? Of course it does. And after someone dear to me recently suggested that I’m choosing fear over love because I’m still not going out right now, I realized that we are definitely not “all in this together.” On the contrary, we are divided in some new ways by this virus.

A lot has been written about the political split in our reactions to the deaths, the masks and even hydroxychloroquine. And, yes, my friend who thinks I should just have faith that God will decide who dies is a political conservative.

But I’m a COVID- 19 conservative, and we are from all over the political map, boomers and Generation Z, black and white, highly educated and not. ( You think those oblivious partiers in the Lake of the Ozarks, Missouri, over Memorial Day were all young and foolish? No, some were old, foolish and own their own boats.) We are not rich and poor, though, because the ability to stay home is a luxury many can’t afford.

A friend from my hometown in Illinois says he hasn’t felt this much peer pressure to relax since high school. And among those who want him to loosen up is his adult daughter, who keeps asking when the grandkids can visit. “Wanna smoke?” was nothing next to that.

Even my husband is surprised

My liberal neighbor has also been annoyed with my caution, though she’s not exactly in the Lake of the Ozarks mode herself. “Be brave!” she urged, by which she meant that surely we could take a little bike ride together.

Another so- left- she’s- right friend used the word “wimp” because I’m waiting for a vaccine, and she doesn’t believe in vaccines.

Even my husband isn’t quite where I am. He won’t wear the snappy COVID shield I bought him and has registered some surprise that I’ve turned out to be the kind of person who would have made an excellent air warden during World War II.

These tensions between friends and loved ones are really only beginning, too, and with lives other than our own at stake, respecting one another’s choices seems like a fantasy. No judgments, my friend keeps saying, the one who thinks God wants us to walk through the world unmasked. But of course she was judging me. And I was judging her right back, even if I also get that in her rural area with almost no cases, the risk- and- reward calculus is different than where I live in Kansas City, where COVID- 19 cases have been spiking.

What risks are worth it?

I want to live to decide what risks to take, though on my next trip to South Sudan I will break out the hand sanitizer I brought with me last time and didn’t touch.

But I also have learned something from my previously COVID- careful 24year- old son, who texted me to say he was going to join a protest against police brutality after the killing of George Floyd. At first, I was furious, because he has had pulmonary problems all his life and really can’t get this virus. That is a risk, he said, but this is important.

And like everybody else, he also gets to decide what risks are worth it. Because how can I argue with a straight face that standing up against institutional racism is a less valid reason than filing an earthquake story nobody remembers, myself included?

BILL TURQUE Melinda Henneberger at home in Kansas City.