Reach Out & Touch Someone in 2022

(Ed. Note: At the end of this essay is the solution to today’s major problem. You may want to skip right to the end and just blow off eveything in between. Or not.)

One of my favorite memes, among those currently floating around, is this one: Nobody claim 2022 as your year. We’re all going to walk in real slow. Be good. Be quiet. Be cautious and respectful. Don’t touch anything.

Okay, but I’m worried about the no-touching business. Two lonnng years ago, the World Health Organization first identified the SARS-CoV-2 virus, now known as our familiar non-friend Covid. And we quit touching. Handrails, restaurant tables, countertops, each other. This made perfectly good sense, as the unknowns about this deadly invader outnumbered the knowns by about a zillion. No sooner had one exited the store with a spritz of hand sanitizer from the ubiquitous jars at doors than one entered the café where entry was prohibited without hand sanitizing again. We re-learned how to handwash to the tune of the birthday song, and shame befell anyone who was seen failing to scrub for the requisite 20 seconds. My mother would be proud. This country soon had the cleanest – or at least the most sanitary – human hands on the planet. All carefully not shaking each other.

Meanwhile, because we knew the invisible enemy lurked in our fellow humans, we began the social distancing thing – creating no-touch zones in check-out lines, along grocery aisles or at street crossings. Pretty soon it also became evident that Covid – and its innumerable invisible variants – hopped around from human to human via invisible air currents, so the next perfectly sensible thing was the mask.

For this new year, masks are us. Masks are just totally good things. Handy for proclaiming messages, honoring your favorite team, encouraging eye contact, upscaling your wardrobe – the concierge in my building, a hip young 30-something, has a collection of matching ties and masks worthy of the New York Times Style magazine. For the record, the older you are, the more wrinkles your mask conceals. The political thing is regrettable, since my mask protects you and your mask protects me and conceptually this creates a beautiful community.

But the touching thing. If we learned anything from all the quarantining and isolating (which will likely be happening intermittently for the foreseeable future) it is that humans don’t do well without being around other humans. Plus, we really need to reach out and touch someone.

One of my regular venues recently inched into in-person events, masked and distanced and please show proof of vaccination. On one’s nametag is your personal choice of dot: Red Dot = Please keep your distance. Yellow Dot = I’m good with elbow bumps and peace signs. Green Dot = Please, let’s hug! The Reds and Yellows are still in no-touch-land, and bless their hearts. I am a hopeless Green Dot person.    

We’re all going to walk in real slow. Be good. Be quiet. Be cautious and respectful. I can go with that. Goodness, quiet, courtesy and respect are still plentiful today, and Lord know we can use a lot more of them. Wear a mask. Keep your distance as needed. But don’t touch anything?

Let’s hear it for the Green Dots.