New Year, Same Old, 26. One Step Forward, Three Steps Back.

It's happened. Yesterday afternoon, new restrictions in our region of Galicia were announced, that will be in effect until, at least, 17 February. All hostelry is to be closed down. Non-essential businesses close at 6PM. No one is allowed to reunite with anyone they do not live with. All cultural offers are to be closed; no movie theatres, no auditoriums, no libraries, no museums. Gyms are closed; sport shall be outside, individual, and masked, even if you're all alone in the park, street, or road (that last one makes no sense). 

This goes into effect at midnight tonight, so I have to scramble and tell everyone I'm going onto Whatsapp video calls. But, only after I get my fiber installed this week, which, hopefully, will happen as promised. Otherwise, I will finish all the data on my wifi connection in two days. I'll be on Whatsapp until I figure out another free way to get together online without a time or person limit and on something I can figure out easily. 

A local bar has hung a sign on Facebook, saying they may very well not open next month, or whenever they are allowed to re-open. It surprised me. They have never wanted for clients, in all the years they have been open, nor in the almost year of the pandemic. Their outdoor tables were always filled with people. I suspect the rule of half the tables on the terrace was never followed there (nor at most bars and cafés). Some cafés are strict with their clients. There's one in town that has a waiter that is always going around and telling people to separate from each other, and to pull up their masks. But others only seem to care for the money their clients bring them; food for today and hunger for tomorrow. There's one café in town which has actually placed more tables out, taking advantage that they are on the corner of a building next to a green area. 

Hostelry owners and workers then complain against the restrictions. But they don't do anything to police their clients. After all, they have the right of admission, and can tell their clients what to do and what not to do. The local police can't even set up road checks every day to make sure no one who shouldn't goes in or out of the township; they can't do rounds of every café and bar in town to make sure everyone complies. 

So now we are to be almost under house arrest, again. Many of us have succumbed to pandemic fatigue. That explains all the binge drinking parties, the get-togethers in streets of major cities and towns, and the neglect in complying with measures against getting sick. Some, who are more interested in money than in public health, have taken advantage of that, and have allowed people to hold parties in their establishments, like in the Teatro Barceló, a famous discotheque in Madrid. Police have raided numerous places, even an Orthodox Church service that had too many people in attendance, even if they were all wearing masks except for the priests. 

Our reactions in this day and age are completely human. Back in the fourteenth century, during the Black Death in Florence, Giovanni Boccaccio described something similar to what many are doing now. "And some, holding it best to live temperately and to avoid excesses of all kinds, made parties and shut themselves up from the rest of the world; eating and drinking moderately of the best, and diverting themselves with music and such other entertainments as they might have within doors; never listening to anything from without to make them uneasy. Others maintained free living to be a better preservative, and would balk no passion or appetite they wished to gratify, drinking and revelling incessantly from tavern to tavern, or in private houses..."  Humans haven't changed much in seven hundred years.

Life continues.