Let's not snatch defeat from the jaws of victory

I am sick.

I'm not sick with COVID-19, nor any life-threatening illness, thankfully, nor any malady that affects my quality of life. For that, I am blessed.

I am sick of all the difficulty that COVID-19 is causing. I feel sick for the loss of life this disease has caused. I feel sick for every person who has lost a job as part of the economic fallout. I feel sick for students who didn't get to finish their normal school experience. I feel sick for the students athletes who had seasons cut short, with the possibility that some may miss out on scholarships they otherwise may have earned.

This is a major inconvenience, and I don't like it one bit.

Despite my personal feelings about having to live and go about my life differently, though, I'm not about to start demanding we suddenly resume normalcy when it comes to being careful about a very preventable disease.

Folks, despite what some people are complaining about on social media, we are far from living in a prison state.

The problem is, we're spoiled, and we don't like it when we don't get our way.

Who cares if we can't get a haircut for a couple of extra weeks. Are we that vain?

Who cares if we can't go to Red Lobster and order the Catch of the Day without planning to enjoy it huddled in our car in the parking lot or back at the house, when it's cold.

Yes, some of the decisions about what is open and "essential" in Illinois and what is not are questionable, but did anyone really think the governor was going to kill the cash cow that recreational marijuana has become?

Let's not forget the fact that gun stores specifically are included as essential businesses in the stay-at-home order. That's the first clue that this is no prison state.

If you want to get an idea about what it means to live in a prison state, I suggest you read "Night" by Elie Wisel, or "The Diary of a Young Girl," better known as "The Diary of Anne Frank." The first was written by a Holocaust survivor and the latter a Holocaust victim who did not survive. Compare their experiences to our current lives.

We're creative enough as a people to keep the inconvenience at bay when it comes to recreation. On Saturday, in Harrisburg, an impromptu "cruise" of people driving in a loop around town was a creative outlet that brought joy to many people's afternoon without jeopardizing anyone's health. People who wanted to show off a treasured vehicle and blow off some steam drove the same loop people in this town have driven for years. Some remarked that with low gas prices, it wasn't a whole lot different from cruising in the mid-1980s. That's the kind of creativity it takes to relieve the tension in a situation such as ours, not demanding an end to stay-at-home measures before they reach full effectiveness.

Tuesday afternoon, our governor announced that a peak in coronavirus cases is expected in mid-May and that numbers look to be much lower than original worst-case-scenario models showed. That's the whole point of this, and why the state took action when it did.

What we're doing is working, and if we can all act like grown-ups, we can get back to normal life sooner rather than later.