There’s no place like home, so Dorothy reminds us. Who is she kidding? Nobody in America. “Home, home on the range,” is a celebration of being in nature, not at home, play with deer and antelope, animals in every yard in New York. And every American knows a store, a restaurant, a bar, or sometimes Home Depot is a second home. That’s grim.

Home is not about family. Home is not about conflict. Home is not about tranquility. Home is not a sanctuary. Home is a place of reality, where each American must look in the mirror and be reconciled with the person causing the image. And homes, however comfortable by magazine standards, does not change these perceptions. Today are scattered sketches of Americans being at home – bored, disturbed, anxious, need sort a familiar spot but to where, when and how often. I’ve heard an American say what he wanted to do during retirement: Do what I want and travel so he and his wife should live life a bit.  

Because that American was moving a thousand miles to live in a new dream home, I asked, “Do you have to travel to live?” Traveling is tough business. Before Corona one had an itinerary, somewhat predictable, and an accompanying schedule to maintain and hours to heed, all like going to elementary school with bells. Travel required strict adhesion to time, or a traveller might  be left behind. Days are rare when one can go and write a diary like an author writing a book. One review of a travel book was perfect, “He has produced a talkie, so dip and skim.” There’s a lot of dipping and skimming in travel writing today.

Travelers have to live out of suitcases; some travelers have to carry their own luggage. Every day travelers see something obtainable in one location in the world but not elsewhere. Should that object be bought as a memory, a treasure, or as an item to forget and disremember its significance not to be conveyed to anyone in the family? It will hang around home until charity gets it.

Home is where there are disagreements, which might be or are not rooted in reality. Fear and terror to families using the home, the family relies on memories to cover deep-seeded hatreds, irrational arguments which go on forever, where incidents are misremembered and placed long before, or long after their actual occurrences, and always a place of great spontaneities which flash rage and idiocies but are unhelpful to understand the past of anything. Unsettled uncertainty of home and its persons drives individuals into a loathing relationship with home, impressions, superstitions and hauntings by which one person can beleaguer as much of the population of the earth as can heard it. These preoccupations make home great stores of psychological ill-effects, violence and bewilderments: God made me do it. I did not have control over myself or my senses. 

Don’t blame God, blame yourself and your shortcomings. It is your house and home.  Yet, everything at home that makes a being human grinds against definitions of domestic bliss, tranquility and peace.

During these days of corona Americans are so antsy to get up and get away from spouses, children, parents, visitors, members of the family that the grand assumptions of conventional wisdom are wrong. Americans resent, hate and despise home. They are claustrophobic about being stationary, stuck to one parcel of land, a building and its inhabitants. Open the country, renew the virus, I want to risk dying wherever the cost (and kill everyone at home!). 

Americans have forgotten: If your best friend – someone you love and hold close – were sick with Corona or anything else, would you visit that person if the disease might make you or members of your family sick for two months? The answer is no, you would not visit. You would not want to visit if you could not protect yourself from being a carrier. And the friend, if it be true friendship, wouldn’t want you to visit and possibly give the disease to you or to others. A sick friend would urge you to stay home and protect yourself. 

These are circumstances facing us today with Corona. The only difference is, Americans are not going to visit their best friends which they can do already. INSTEAD, Americans want to go out amongst strangers, in perfect or ill-health and all exercising various degrees of care for themselves or others. That is not trusting fellow Americans. That is reckless and a conscious disregard for the rights and the lives of others.  

Corona is the perfect example of a public health emergency. Americans being in and about with one another – concerts, sporting events, public observances, theaters, political meetings, religious services, community service organizations, on-and-on, as individual Americans do not know who is out there and who they are meeting. Does anyone have a cough, a temperature, an ache, or any other undisclosed symtom. Like Tuberculosis and its asylums 130 years ago, like the flu 102 years ago, like the measles and polio, care had to be taken to protect the great American people, every individual as we have recently learned in our way into the future. Anything short of that reverses the course of centuries, taking human beings into medieval times when subjects of a monarchy or a despot were not citizens and friends to one another. They were units to be discarded! 

The attitudes of Americans begin at home, being at ease in that setting and teaching each self and our families discipline, cleanliness and charity. Find solace and peace there, and the country will benefit from the Corona experience.