Fear is powerful.

When anxiety is left unchecked, it can be socially damaging. People say and do things that they would never dream of during more stable times.

Like many others, I’ve consumed enough fictional plague narrative (The Stand, The Walking Dead, etc) to know that as much as everyone wants to live only in the moment, we should always be thinking ahead to what comes next.

To put it another way, if you have said that staying alive is the most important thing, then you should also be thinking about what we are staying alive for.

Then, let that shape how we are treating one another right now.

Are we staying alive so that we can become more politically conservative and tell others how to define their family units?

I hope to hell not, but I am hearing precisely this from self-described liberals who are actively policing others’ choices about who they have chosen to be with in their quarantine — as if a marriage certificate or blood relation creates a magical force field. It doesn’t. As long everyone’s little units — families by blood or choice — interact with a supermarket cashier or continue to touch the gas pump without washing hands after, they are potentially coming into contact with the virus. The virus is not going to skip a household because it consists of a husband, wife, and their child rather than three unrelated roommates.

And there is the other lesson from those apocalypse narratives: there is absolutely nothing that guarantees the safety of yourself or others. Some behaviors are certainly riskier than others, but there is no such thing as being 100% safe.

That sounds depressing, but it isn’t. Not to me.

It tells us to take reasonable precautions (see CDC suggestions and WHO recommendations, not what some lunatic on social media has concocted) but stop acting as if this crisis gives anyone a pass for behaving terribly toward other people.

It’s never appropriate to publicize, without their permission, someone’s private health information. I thought we already sorted that out when it came to keeping people’s HIV status confidential, but like how people used to be allowed to define their families for themselves, this other liberal idea seems to have gone out the window. If we are to all assume that we could be infected, then it serves no good purpose to widely spread stories about who may or may not having tested positive.

What violating someone’s privacy does — for the person violating it — is help create a scapegoat. Having a “patient zero” gives some a sense of security, albeit a false sense.

As others have pointed out, scapegoating has a lasting social impact long after whatever currently plagues us has gone, not to mention the stigma that is likely to follow the individual.

Is that what we’re staying alive for, to blast one another on social media because we heard a rumor that a sick person got on a bus? To look at a photo from a misleading angle and chastise people who we assumed were not standing a minimum of 3-6 feet from others? Tell others they’re doing it wrong, even when what they’re doing is described as acceptable by the actual experts based on the best information they have right now?

Is it to be a species that hoards toilet paper?

I don’t think it is.