And the People Stayed Home

When Kitty O’Meara posted “And the People Stayed Home” on her Facebook page on March 13, 2020, there was no need to specify the context of her meditation on how a disruption of people’s daily routines could lead to personal and social transformation. Her original readers immediately understood that she wrote these words in reaction to the global spread of the COVID-19 virus. Two days earlier, on March 11, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic, and former President Donald Trump announced a national emergency on March 13. Global air travel became restricted. Schools and universities moved their classes online. Entertainment venues began closing, and most restaurants switched to providing only take-out service. Millions of people were forced to work from home or temporarily or permanently lost their jobs. By April, the virus was rampant in all parts of the United States, and Americans were becoming used to living in a lockdown and wearing masks in public. The situation was already dire in Europe and parts of Asia, and by the second half of 2020 the virus was daily killing thousands of people worldwide.

Even though O’Meara wrote the poem during the preliminary stages of the pandemic, it was already becoming clear that this disease would cause a profound and lasting disruption of human activities and potentially change the very fabric of life. People were increasingly aware that difficult and sorrowful times were ahead, so it took quite a leap of faith to imagine, as O’Meara did, that tragedy and disorder would ultimately lead to positive personal and social changes. The poem does not dwell on the negative consequences of the pandemic, but it certainly presents loss and grief as the inevitable precursors of the beneficial transformation it envisions.