Only time will tell whether the forced lock-down purportedly to mitigate the public health consequences of the COVID-19 virus was necessary governance to deal with an unprecedented crisis or one of the greatest over-reaches in government power that continued to feed on itself reaching ridiculous levels of trying to control the public. I suspect it will be the latter, certainly to the extent that any number of rules clearly were unconstitutional and the government had no legal power to implement them, regardless of what might be well intentions. It will even be worse if it turns out decisions were made not based on public health needs, but as a way to try and skew the presidential election coming this fall. Clearly, for those vulnerable populations this has been a serious health concern, but it still remains to be seen, to me at least, whether this will justify the government power grab and control of peoples lives. Hopefully this will not establish a precedent for actions in the future.
Regardless, like everybody else I have been stuck at home for the last two months. While I don’t socialize much anyway, my daily life hasn’t seemed that different except for the inability to freely leave and do whatever I want, which slowly grinds down on your mental state. The big impacts to my year’s plans have been that all of my Shakespeare festivals, which are a major part of my summer and fall, were canceled. My third photography tour of the year had been scheduled for mid-May, but that had to be put off, but hopefully it will still happen later this year. So while I’ve been stuck at home I tried to do some productive things regarding my photography. The first thing was this has given me a chance to work through the backlog of my pictures from trips over the last few years that I hadn’t completely sorted though. While this is still a work in progress, I’ve improved things a lot. The other thing I’ve done was to create my first photo book. I was fortunate to get a voucher for a significant discount (which I even was able to bump up in value) to put together a high quality book of some of my model photography. The 60 page book turned out great, and I immediately set off to put together a book from one of my foreign trips.
Hopefully this will all pass away. Unfortunately California, while one of the first to close things down may be one of the last to open things up again. We shall see. I can’t wait to get back to some adventures away from my house.