It's absolutely amazing how many people have knowingly or unknowingly mistaken the phased permission/"release" of 25% of the state's non-essential workers to return if urgent as "All retailers, restaurants, and businesses can open starting Monday!". No one can coerce you into returning unless the work you do is vital/impossible to do remotely. Whether you're a full time worker, an intern/researcher, work several jobs, whether you've been furloughed or outright fired, the situation can be conflicting and entirely unclear. But if you're doing what you can from home or in a hybrid manner, with minimal travel and interaction, you've been doing the right thing for yourselves and humanity. There will be a day when restarting makes sense, but that day is not now. That day is not May 25th, or June 1st as proposed. Those dates have been set as permission to go back if need be, to alleviate genuinely problematic backlogs, for people involved in essential work that cannot be done from home- not if your employer is tactfully taking advantage of you. Not even if you're scrambling over the fate of your non-urgent livelihood. You need to live in order to have a livelihood, folks.

Please understand that the stay-at-home advisory (I refuse to be socially conditioned into referring to it as the "safer at home" order at a time when this pandemic is nowhere near over) is for the safety of all people. All people. It's not a lockdown to "punish" or imprison you by any means, so you can stop resisting and protesting something that's been put out to save your lives. The concept of a "new normal" is going to become a "new lockdown" if the numbers keep rising; what's more painful to understand is that they're using many of us as guinea pigs for the purposes of statistical monitoring- how horrid a thing it is for the upper hand to knowingly allow hundreds of people to potentially die for a test run. Pathetic.

Just some food for thought, if you're planning on being hopelessly reckless on Memorial Day by going to one of the opened beaches, or to a restaurant even at limited capacity, really ask yourself if you're mentally sane if you're willing to drive miles just to sit on a towel on the sand, 12 feet apart from other people, with a mask on your face with no games or group selfies allowed- if you're willing to sit down and dine while sticking fries under your mask into your mouth in a claustrophobic cubicle of a seating arrangement, or risk exposing your face/germs and getting the entire place evacuated. This entire saga of misery continues because people aren't thinking or being responsible. And if you really, passionately do demand to go back to work in a non-essential industry because you don't want to live off government funds that you somehow find debilitating and degrading, sign up for a job on the frontlines. There's plenty of valid latitude to go back to the workforce there.