“Give me liberty or give me death” is a different kind of ask when your choice means taking untold numbers of family, friends, and neighbors down into the grave with you.

Maybe someday we will evolve into sterile mechanical beings but in the meantime our squishy human bodies and the existence of communicable disease mean that what we do affects everyone around us. Right now we need to consider ourselves deadly weapons, and protect one another.

It’s a cruel reality of a pandemic that we become dangerous to one another. A touch, a kiss, a conversation, can set off a chain reaction that ends with the hard, lonely death of someone you’ll never know in a room you’ve never seen. We stay apart to spare each other that pain.