Shortly after the governor of New Jersey issued his executive order for shelter-in-place and closed all the public schools, someone created a community group for my township on Facebook. There were lots of ideas about how the community could pull together to help less-privileged members of the town get computers and internet access so that the school children could attend classes from home. Some were organising to create meals for the children who were dependent on school lunches. This is all good.
But there was also much-seeming self-congratulation.
But if our community was so caring and giving then why was it so hard to find toilet paper? What were the meat and chicken shelves empty?
The people in my township who hoarded toilet paper, meat, eggs, and chicken, who emptied the CVS of every bottle of Tylenol. Is that the real community? Or is community a facade?
So here I am, a person with Type 1 diabetes, who uses alcohol prep pads to clean my glucose test sites and infusion set sites, who normally had no issues sourcing these from Amazon.com or the local CVS, panicking on Monday after seeing "sold out" on all the brands sold on Amazon. Being very concerned when we found out that the local CVS was also sold out. Relieved and then panicked because we could order them on Walmart but only one box. I normally order two. But even now I am more privileged than many who struggled to find supplies even before COVID-19.
