Spotlight on the Out-of-Sight

One of the things the coronavirus has done is shed light on groups of people who don’t get much attention in what we would call “normal” times. Here are three that stand out now to me.

The first are the elderly – specifically, those who live in nursing homes. What are these places? It has been pointed out that there are likely more of these homes in our culture, while in others, older people tend to spend more of their senior years at home with their families. But in many cases, loving families simply don’t have the facilities or expertise to properly care for the oldest among them. Curiously, though, nursing home residents dying of COVID-19 are often not included in the disease’s casualty figures.

Then there are the prisoners. It’s said that the US is the clear world leader in the percentage of the population behind bars. Most of us are perfectly content to have these individuals locked up so that we don’t have to deal with them or think about them. This group includes those whose offenses are no longer crimes and, of course, those who didn’t commit crimes in the first place, and are disproportionately people of color. Even for those who have fairly earned their sentences, however, we might wonder if they deserve to be trapped in what amounts to a COVID petri dish.

Finally, there are the folks who work in meat-packing plants, often foreigners placed at close quarters, working with animal parts. Many of these plants are in fly-over states, and in those states, they are often COVID hotspots. Most of us meat consumers probably prefer not to know where this part of our diet comes from and how the animals (still another forgotten group) are raised. While I’m sure that most of the vegans and animal-rights enthusiasts don’t support seeing humans get sick, they may be pleased that a spotlight is shining into a corner where the majority of us don’t want to go. It has been suggested by some that COVID itself is Mother Nature’s way of paying us back for the abuse that is done to animals, as the disease itself is believed to have jumped from animals to humans, who are not naturally immune from it.

These groups are the ones currently getting some extra attention due to the virus, and I’m sure you can think of others. It usually takes a really inconvenient truth to shake us out of automatic thinking, and once in a while, we need that.