The very rich, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “are different from you and me.”

“Yes,” rejoined Ernest Hemingway,” they have more money.”

Neither writer mentioned that money isn’t the only difference between the very rich and the rest of us. The people we think of as being at the top know next to nothing about the rest of us. How we live, what we think, what we believe, what we pray or hope for.

Change Fitzgerald’s word “rich” to “powerful,” and the sentiment holds. The powerful are different from you and me. They have more power. And they also have little idea how the rest of us live, think, believe, pray or hope.

Take the announcement May 13 by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that vaccinated people no longer needed masks, indoors or out. CDC gave no prior word to the states, which in the absence of federal action had run the response to COVID-19.

Seems the CDC honchos had no clue what would happen next.

How do we know who is vaccinated and who isn’t? Who will enforce mask mandates for the unvaccinated? What happened to the earlier guidance that vaccinated people keep wearing masks so they don’t become carriers of the disease — that is, the Typhoid Marys of 2021? No one from CDC answered any of these questions. Or dozens of others.

Within five days, 23 states had dropped their mask mandates. Some had already ended mandates. And, South Dakota, which has three times Maine’s infection rate and nearly four times our death rate, never had a mask mandate. Governors in states such as Texas and Florida dropped the mandates and forbade towns and cities to require local masking.

CDC head Rochelle Walensky said on CNN, “We are asking people to take their health into their own hands, to get vaccinated, and if they don’t, then they continue to be at risk. For the unvaccinated, our policy has not changed.” Nothing about applying an unchanged policy. She said we are at a place “where vaccinated people were going to be able to take off their mask(s). We’re lucky to be there (now) with the science that we have.”

Odd to hear the CDC talking up science. Michael Lewis reports in “The Premonition” that the CDC had been not just uninterested in responding to COVID, but it had actively discouraged response. Some frontline people — Lewis calls them redneck epidemiologists — sent a proposed plan to the CDC for review. The plan disappeared. Lewis writes that the CDC is good at research and report-writing but it hasn’t a clue about controlling or preventing disease.

The CDC was more interested in CYA than in fighting an onrushing virus. And it covered its derriere so well that now it pretends it led the fight against COVID.

It didn’t. The states and the National Institutes of Health did.

People trying to figure out CDC policy aren’t the only confused ones. President Biden’s American Rescue Plan sent billions of dollars to millions of people. Just as the country is trying to reopen, employers, especially in hospitality businesses, are having a hard time enticing laid-off workers back to the job or enticing new ones to sign on.

Republicans in Congress and state houses said it was because the $300 a week added unemployment benefit in Biden’s bill was so generous that no one would work when they could avoid work and still get pay. To be sure, some people do just that. But studies last year showed that when the added benefit was $600 a week, virtually no one stayed home if they could work. The Republicans blaming the “Biden benefit” seem ignorant of the earlier “Trump benefit.”

Is their ignorance intentional?

Here are some reasons people aren’t returning to work, as reported last Saturday by The New York Times. Some in public-facing jobs fear that constant contact with the public exposes them and their families to the virus. Some use the extra money to buy time while they go after a better job. I know at least one person doing each of these things, and one of them isn’t even getting the federal benefit, thanks to the Maine Department of Labor.

Some don’t want the onus the CDC has put on them for enforcing mask policies for the unvaccinated. Some can’t go back to work because they have to stay home with the kids, who aren’t yet back in school full-time.

And some have decided to retire, like the 64-year-old man who retired rather than go back to his $2.83-an-hour (plus tips) job at an Olive Garden near Pittsburgh.

Deciding whether to return to work for $2.83 an hour is a choice the brass at the CDC, and nearly everywhere else, never has to make. They’ve been up so long they don’t know what down is like.

Maybe after a person reaches a higher station, she should be required to go back to the mail room for a few weeks every year to be reminded how the other 98% live.

Bob Neal highly recommends “The Premonition.” From the book, he learned that the basic response to COVID was written by a middle-school girl for a science-fair project. Neal can be reached at [email protected].