When Covid hit Peterborough, NH in March of 2020, my perspective was yanked completely out of focus. The ugliness that surfaced when power and fear combined revealed how thin the veneer of neighborliness had always been. This was a hard contrast to the ice storm of December 2008 that wiped out power for weeks. In that scenario, people stepped up and really made a difference by helping those in actual need. But with Covid, everything was very different. Dark and full of nervous suspicion.
It’s ironic that the town that inspired Grover’s Corners, the setting of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town and America’s shorthand for small-town decency, set about casting out its own. Some people became the missionaries of compliance, then guardians of virtue, then something far worse…true believers in the righteousness of exclusion.
