A Safe Place in the USA

I’m not sure why I’m writing this. It seems that the people who most need to hear me won’t listen. I’m going to try anyway.

I live in a place that most of you have probably never heard about, an island called Saipan in the United States Commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands, a community of roughly 60,000 people. Since the COVID nightmare began, Saipan has experienced a grand total of thirty (30) known infections and only two (2) deaths. A new case has not been reported here for more than two weeks. On Saipan, for now, we are safe.

Saipan has advantages over the virus that places in the mainland US and elsewhere do not have. We are isolated geographically on a tiny island in the Western Pacific roughly 7,000 miles from my hometown in the middle of America where the virus now rages. The closest place to Saipan that you have probably heard about is the neighboring island of Guam, and because of our isolation, we have been able to effectively quarantine all persons arriving here.

The main advantage we have out here, though, it would seem, is that we care about each other.

In the Marianas, we take care of each other by wearing masks and social distancing always. We don’t bitch about it. We don’t whinge and moan about some imaginary freedom to prance around without covering our mouths and noses. We don’t conduct days of online research into the efficacy of masks and then spend hours screaming at each other about it on Facebook and Twitter. We just wear the masks, all of us, always.

For us, this is not and never has been a political issue. The government here is entirely controlled by the Republican Party, the same GOP that you have in the mainland. Our Governor strongly supports the current President. On Saturday, March 14, 2020, I sat right next to our Governor’s family as we all watched our kids play soccer matches together. Then on Sunday, March 15, 2020, the Governor announced that the government would shut down, effective immediately. Strict curfews and guidelines on private business were put in place and everyone complied in spite of great economic pain.

For us, it also has nothing to do with religion. The Catholic Church here predominates, but we have many other faiths represented including substantial numbers of Christian Koreans and Bangladeshi Muslims. When this all started to unfold, it was painful for these people to realize that they could not worship together in physical proximity, but they stayed apart, and out of the churches and mosques.

These measures and the cooperation of all our people have kept us safe.

Little by little the government here has been easing up the restrictions, and life is settling into a new kind of normal. People are taking up their lives and starting to go about their business again, and as far as we can tell, it’s happening safely.

Just a couple of days ago, on Saturday morning, I got in my car to do some errands. At each stop, I parked my car and reached for my mask before going inside. I stood in line at the post office, the grocery store, and our (used to be) Costco with at least six feet between myself and other persons. Every other person I encountered that day and every other day since this all began does the same thing. In the three and a half months that we have been dealing with this, I have not heard one person complain about wearing a mask or social distancing. On Saipan, we would see such behavior for exactly what it is — selfish, immature, moronic, hateful insanity.

When I arrived back home from my Saturday morning errands, I pulled into the drive, parked the car, and again reached for my mask, forgetting for a moment that I was at home where a mask is not needed. On Saipan, and in most of the rest of the world, taking care of each other in this way is now reflexive and habitual. Only in the mainland US is this something to argue over, and the stupidity is killing you.

The whole world is watching you fuck this all up. Every night in our house, we watch the evening news from Japan. Nearly every night we see stories and images of the horrific idiocy of US behavior. The Japanese, like all of our allies, would laugh if they were not already crying.

On Saipan we are safe, for now, but we are not letting our guard down. We know that mask wearing and social distancing work, and that this must continue for the foreseeable future. As far away as we are, though, we are (mostly) Americans and what happens in the mainland affects all of us here. Several of my own family members back home are sick, some of them very sick, at the time I write this.

Wear a damn mask.