The closing of Jean’s Place hit me fairly hard today; perhaps I had seen and heard enough bad news already today to last an ordinary lifetime.

Seeing these good people who loved their jobs so much and had worked at Jean’s for so long crying and getting laid off for the first time in their lives was shattering.

All kinds of people are suffering and dying from this virus all over the world, most of them older people with other illnesses.

While the virus strikes many millions of adults, the one most likely to die are people just like me, and this idea hit me out of the blue today as I sat in my car with Zinnia.

I realized that this just might be the last chance I have to eat in this diner, seeing the devastation and fear in the workers’ eyes.

Everywhere, people are suffering, losing their jobs, losing their education, losing their benefits, their recreation, their passions, their friends, their hard work. We are all talking about the people who get the disease; we are not talking nearly so much about the silent victims, ignored both by media and politicians.

And  I don’t mean the press conference patter – we know from history that it means nothing.

This subject seems to be a taboo, all the more reason to talk about it, like the New York Times did Monday morning.

Sitting in the parking lot outside of Jean’s, shaking and nearly in tears,  I thought, if the only people dying in our country are just like me, was I in some way causing this suffering?

Older people die, and they all die of something. Every farmer likes to say that. Is my life worth the suffering of so many people?

Is all of this suffering for us older people with underlying diseases, and by definition, then, for me?

It is an extreme kind of thought and an uncomfortable one.

I know this all isn’t my fault or the fault of older people. And I know it isn’t about me.

But I was jarred into thinking, as I saw the pain and fear and sadness in the faces of these good people – none of them wealthy or with much in the way of savings –  are we considering the other people who get hurt so badly in disasters like this?

American Airlines has been notorious for years for screwing its customers with enthusiasm (along with most of the other airlines) with smaller and smaller seats and higher and higher fees. They got bailed out in 2008.

The airlines are, according to the media, expected to get billions and billions of dollars to keep them solvent and operating.

Jean’s Place will not get thousands and thousands to dollars – or even pennies – to save them if the ban lasts the eight weeks it’s supposed to last. Jean and her family know that, so does anyone close to the financial workings of the government in catastrophes.

They probably won’t get to live long enough to fill out the paperwork. They don’t have the lawyers that the airlines have.

Here, in this poor rural community, we are beginning to see the victims of this virus and the resulting economic collapse that fighting this disease is causing.

Like the mothers and fathers who can’t work because their children have been taken out of their schools. These are the people who can’t afford daycare, even if there was daycare available up here.

I know a bar owner whose bar/restaurant was ordered closed. He says he’s good for four or five weeks, and he just put every penny he ever had into buying the bar and renovating it. I know a truck driver who had to quit her job to stay home and care for her two children.

She was given five hours’ notice of the closing of her kid’s school.

I know of a refugee father in Albany laid off in minutes after the President declared a state of emergency. A doctor in the Middle East, he’s been cleaning floors in luxury hotels for three years in America, a minimum wage job he says he was fortunate to get. There is no other job in sight.

I don’t see people on  TV worrying about him (I guess Bernie Sanders did on the debate Sunday, but we don’t want to hear that message), or debating how much aid he will receive—or promising him to make him whole.

The victims mount by the day, hourly wage workers, legal and undocumented migrants, small business owners. Jean’s family has put all of their blood and tears into this business for decades, giving loyal employers security and loving workplace, not to mention a beloved haven for their customers in a town ravaged by the trade deals.

Gone in the stroke of a pen, or several pens. I wonder if we have considered the balance between a Pandemic like a coronavirus and the devastation of our efforts to stop it are causing?

And how do we balance such a thing, how do we compare one to the other?

The governor wants Jean’s Place closed (except for take-out) for up to eight weeks.

Does he know they are unlikely to survive a closing as long as that, that for Jean’s Place, this is a probable death penalty? That five or six hardworking women will be out of work, possibly for years.

One of the diner workers is a woman living in a trailer with her husband, who is very ill. Who will bail them out, or offer them emergency relief as their bills mount up and they struggle to pay for their medicine?”

Which toll is the highest? Do we know? Are we researching it? Who suffers the most: The people who get sick, or the people who lose their homes and peace of mind because of the sickness?

“We have to give due seriousness to this disease breaking out across the globe, ‘ said Nicholas Evans, a philosophy professor at the University of Massachusetts Lowell who has criticized Harvard University for failing to consider the lives of poor students before announcing a move to online classes.

“At the same time, we have to think about equity and the way the risks and benefits of measures we take are distributed.”

What Evans said in a New York Times article Monday – “Some Ask A Taboo Question: Is America Overreacting To Coronavirus?” – made me think, as taboo ideas often do. Things look differently when you are looking right at them.

I don’t know the answer to the question Evans raised or that I am thinking about here. I just know it’s essential to think about it.

I do wonder when I see the devastation the closing of a small diner in a poor upstate New York town can wreak if we grasp the impact of what we are doing in such a massive and hurried way? There has to be a better way than this, I thought, sitting in that parking lot, trying not to cry, thinking about the many people who see the diner as their second home, and who come almost every day to see their true family.

This week, Bishop Maginn closed. The poor students there are on their own, some with no money, no technology, no education, or parental supervision, some with no English.

Like the workers at Jean’s, there is no aid for them from any government program.

One educator criticized me for suggesting on my blog that the students band together for their online classes and share precious technology.

Didn’t I know, she sneered, “that this could be dangerous, that they could spread the disease?” Leave them alone, she said, railing about “Community Spread,” a couple of months alone in their small apartments is “no big deal.”

They should not be going outside, she said.

Bishop Maginn High School had no choice but to close, almost every school in America is closing.

I’m not aware that anyone in government and media gave much thought to what would happen to these kids and their families after being forced out of their schools, a haven for many.

Politicians are sensitive to public moods, and they sometimes seem to compete feverishly to show how serious they are about stopping this virus, as their constituents demand and expect.

But I do wonder sometimes if the damage  to the lives of so many millions of people – many of who are in no position to recover – will ultimately be as damaging as the cure, which many are already calling a “war.” Wars come with casualties.

Sometimes, what the government is doing seems like steamrolling to me, sometimes prudent and overdue. There is no due process, no recourse, in a state of emergency.

It’s a  hard and confusing time. No one wants to stop and waste the time it would take to think about it. And no one really wants to think about it at all. We just want the virus to be gone.

Not only are people getting wrecked, so, apparently,  is our economy, a mess that economists say will take years, if not decades, to repair.

It isn’t that we should fight the virus.

But shouldn’t we think about fighting all the victims of the virus as well – not all of them end up having a disease?

There are lots of ways to get sick, even face a kind of death – Jean’s Place – in America.  Victims of Friendly Fire. These are not the people who end up in hospitals.

In one sense, Jean’s is lucky – they are loved, well known, a loving and cohesive family. If anyone can fight their way through this they can.

But what about the victims I never see or know, the invisible ones that never get on TV or even on a blog?

I guess I got sensitized to this issue today because the ones who are dying from this disease are so very much like me.

We are taking apart our society day by day and creating countless new victims in the name of saving fragile older people nearing the ends of their lives.

It is difficult for me to grasp the significance of being one of those people at “risk.” It’s not where I want to be. And I surely don’t want to be causing the suffering of anyone else.

I don’t have an answer to this profound moral and ethical dilemma, just some nagging questions about it. I have a sense that we’re not thinking about the whole picture in our rush to wipe out the coronavirus, only one part of it.

Jean’s Place opened me up to this other kind of suffering, even though I knew intellectually that it exists. And as I think about it,  I just can’t see or find a balancing concern for the many different types of victims who never get to the hospitals, are never tested or counted, so many of them poor or working-class people.

There is little or no help for them, no rush for a cure to their pain and fear, no mobs howling for their salvation.

I hope Jean’s Place makes it, but either way, I won’t forget them. They opened my eyes in more ways than one.