I’ve been avoiding writing about Covid-19 directly. There is more than enough out there without me adding my two cents worth— to say the least. But an incident happened to Peggy and me the other day when we were out shopping while wearing our masks that deserves a brief post.

Peggy and I were shopping at Home Depot a couple of days ago, buying what I needed to make a gate for our shrub garden. We had worn our face masks while we shopped and then worn them back to the truck while we were loading our purchases into the back. A man in his 60s was parked next to us and digging through his car trunk. It was stuffed to the brim and looked like it hadn’t been cleaned or organized in 10 years. He spotted us and quickly started sifting through the mess and came up with a black sweatshirt. He held it over his nose and mouth and pretended to shoot us.

Peggy was stunned and I was angry. I was sorry I didn’t have my black cowboy hat along so I could slap it on my head and pretend to shoot him back.

But I didn’t have my hat and wouldn’t have done it anyway. What we don’t need during this pandemic is more tension and confrontations. For all I knew, he had a gun in his trunk and may have pulled it out. It was probably an irrational fear— odds are, he was just being a smart ass— but people have been shot lately over the mask issue. And I thought of the armed men who invaded the Michigan Statehouse a couple of weeks ago demanding that the state be reopened. People marching around with military-grade, semi-automatic weapons and screaming, or just standing silently, are scary. And they mean to scare us and to intimidate us. They aren’t freedom fighters, or true patriots, or heroes; they are bullies.

The real heroes are the men and women working in hospitals and serving as first responders in the fight against Covid-19.

We all want to see America up and running again. We all want to see the world up and running. It has to happen. The point is: It can be done in a reasonable and relatively safe way. We have all the information we need. It involves widespread testing, identification of those who have the disease, voluntary isolation with support, and tracing the contacts of the people with Covid-19. For the effort to work effectively in the US, it needs to be carried out on the national level with national funding. A small portion (estimated around 5%) of the two-plus trillion dollars voted by Congress for economic relief will cover the cost. Countless lives saved and a healthy economy will be the likely results. With true leadership, we can return to a relatively normal life while we wait for the more permanent solution of a vaccine. Prevention works.