This one’s a no-brainer.
If you are anyone who, over the past couple of weeks, has been on the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic, you are an Unsung Hero.
Perhaps you:
- Man and woman the Westport Health District — performing coronavirus tests, administering aid, answering questions, soothing nerves
- Serve in emergency operations with the police, fire, EMS departments — or anyone else in government called on to plan, execute, render assistance or in any other way help the town
- Work in a medical practice, helping some patients who may have been infected and many more with their usual ailments, knowing all the while you had more contact with, and less protection from, sick people than anyone else
- Are teaching students online, while at the same time soothing nerves, offering non-school advice, and ensuring continuity of education despite having never done so before
- Are a school custodian or maintenance worker elsewhere who put on a mask and gloves, and spent days deep cleaning every square inch you could find, and did it well, despite your very real fears and anxieties
- Own a business, and decided (or had to) to shut down, for the good of the community, and despite all your fears, still worry more about your employees and customers
- Work in a store or market overrun by panicked customers; despite your low pay and own fears you stocked shelves, worked registers, answered questions, and did it all with grace and courtesy
- Ditto all those restaurant workers who are adapting to a rapidly changing environment, preparing and serving food while observing new rules and regulations, and doing it with enormous care and concern
- Reach out through your religious institution or civic organizaiton– even though its doors are closed and meetings canceled — to someone in need
Temple Israel is one of the many religious institutions now conducting services, classes and programs virtually.
- Are suddenly thrust into the role of teacher, in addition to the disruption of having to work your own job remotely, or worry about what was going on at the office because you had to be home
- Calm a child’s nerves, bring food to an elderly neighbor, or help a stranger figure out what to do now that the library, Senior Center, YMCA, Town Hall — and every other gathering place — is closed
- Or are doing anything else to help someone else during these unprecedented days.
Thank you for helping make this town a “community.”
We’ll need you — and everyone else — to keep doing it for a while.
No one knows what’s ahead. But with all these Heroes in our midst, we’ll get through all this.
There’s no other choice.
(Do you know an Unsung Hero? Email dwoog@optonline.net to let us know!)