What a week, and there is more to come

Jeff Green | Mar 25, 2020

It has been an unprecedented in week in the life of the county, the province, and our little corner of it. The scope of it started to come clear to me last Thursday when I was driving down Road 38 to deliver papers to post offices at about 7:15. When I pulled out the Verona Post office heading south, I looked to my left and instead of  the row of 10 or more cars heading into Kingston which  I normally see, there was nothing moving at all, not a single car or walker. The traffic stayed sparse until I reached Perth Road and Rutlege. Through the whole run from Rutledge to Inverary. I saw one car, headed north. It was like a Sunday morning. No one seemed to headed into Kingston to work.

People are working from home to be sure, but people have also been laid off, lots of people. Entire industries are on hold. The rest of the week has become stranger. Everything has been shutting down so quickly that when the government declared that non-essential businesses needed to close, most of them were closed already. Grocery shopping now resembles and odd dance or some kind of performance piece as everyone tries to get what they need to get while avoiding people, all the while awkwardly greeting friends they never see anymore. All we know is that we need to avoid each other for the next 2 weeks, which could turn into 4 or 6. And even when this stage ends, it will be a very gradual return to some kind of new normal.

We are all separated from each other now, and at the same time we are all in this together.

On the whole, people are supporting each other, with exceptions. Social Media has been a lifeline.

It has also demonstrated its failings as an information source.

Twice in the last week, I have been made aware of posts alleging price gouging by local businesses. It took less than two minutes of researching pricing to determine that the claims were baseless. Prices vary at all times and even more when there is a supply shortage and that was all that was going on in each of the cases.

But someone who wants to level an accusation does not do research, they just make claims and those claims are passed around with lighting speed. My responses to those posts received 10,000 views within hours, so I can only assume the posts themselves were seen by 100,000 people or more.

This incident demonstrates, in my view, demonstrates the value of traditional media, with the checks and balances it brings, sometimes as a complement and other times as a corrective for the excesses of social media.

Next week would normally be our April Fool’s edition, but it might not be the greatest time for fake news stories.

We need some lightness however, so we are inviting readers, particularly young readers, to send in something funny, even silly. We’ll try to put some laughs into a newspaper that has been all about fear and bad news for the last few weeks.

There may be a fake news story in the mix as well, but mostly we aim to keep things light, and please, no dark humour, just the light stuff.