Random thoughts about the virus that's going to be with us forever

 A couple of the local schools are going back to remote learning only for the coming week. The combination of students testing positive, staff getting sick and calling in, and a distinct lack of substitutes for everything from teachers to janitors to bus drivers pushed the districts into shutting down for the immediate future. They say they're doing remote learning, but that's going to be hard to pull off if they don't have enough teachers to handle in-school classes. Brief closures thanks to a district getting slammed by influenza were not unusual in the past, but of course SARS-COV-2 has put its own distinct spin on things. Instead a closure lasting only a day or two and happening maybe once during a school year, now the closures last for weeks and come and go unpredictably. 

Back in April 2020 the Younger Daughter and I were chatting about likely outcomes for the pandemic. My prediction at the time was that it had already spread too widely to get it under control. COVID-19 was going to end up an endemic disease, one of those things that was around more or less all the time, and about all we could do was take the precautions advised not-quite-two-years ago (masks, social distancing, lots and lots of handwashing and cleansers)(I'm wishing now I owned stock in Purell)(or, more accurately, GOJO -- they invented Purell) and hope the virus eventually burned itself out. You know, sweep through the population, pick off the most vulnerable, and then disappear, kind of like the Spanish flu did back a hundred years ago. If we got lucky, pharmaceutical companies would manage to come up with a vaccine before it reached the point where trucks patrolled neighborhoods asking people to bring out their dead. 

As it turned out, Big Pharma did manage to pull a rabbit out of the hat and introduced vaccines a year ago. The initial reaction was for most people to happily get in line for the jabs. Lots of complaining about not enough vaccine for everyone who wanted it, people having trouble scheduling appointments, it was taking too long for the eligible categories to drop down to where just about any adult could get it. . . That enthusiasm didn't last long. 

The same conspiracy nutjobs who were (and still are) convinced SARS-COV-2 is a hoax, a bizarre way for the medical establishment to inflate its reimbursement rates, bombarded the rest of us with enough weirdness and right-wing propaganda that a sizable percentage of the U.S. population decided that given a choice between dying and getting vaccinated, death sounded good. 

At this point, to be honest, I'm fine with the anti-vaxxers and other Covidiots making that choice. I just wish they weren't cluttering up the hospitals and preventing other people from getting necessary care. You know, they wanted freedom from medical tyranny because they don't trust the doctors or the government. Fine, don't go to the Emergency Room. Do us all a favor and quietly die at home. 

Actually, one of the saddest things about the Covidiots is that even when they're dying from a disease that has killed hundreds of thousands of people in this country they don't want to believe they have it themselves. They and their families scream at doctors and nurses and demand to know what they really have. Bizarre doesn't begin to cover it as a description.

In any case, thanks to the fact we're still nowhere near having enough people vaccinated to really push SARS-COV-2 back into the metaphorical bottle, it appears we all are going to be living with it for a long, long time. As a society we've forgotten there was a time when epidemics swept through communities on a regular basis: cholera, smallpox, yellow fever, typhoid, measles, polio, diphtheria, mumps, plague, chickenpox, and others. Some of those are no longer an issue thanks to improved sanitation, some got eliminated (or close to it) after specific vaccines were invented. With most of them the death rates were higher than the mortality rates for SARS-COV-2. I'm not sure what conclusions to draw from that knowledge -- hey, be grateful things aren't worse? -- but I do think seeing fair numbers of the general public routinely masked is going to be with us for the foreseeable future.

And, speaking of masks, the fact that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's latest messaging on masking and other issues is coming across as more than a bit muddled does not surprise me at all. I have seen the CDC from the inside. The individual scientists, the actual subject matter experts, do amazing work. Having seen them in action I have no doubt that if just one of those way-down-in-the-bureaucratic-food-chain experts was allowed to speak, whatever he or she said would be clear and make sense. It might be phrased in enough technical terminology to have a lay person reaching for a dictionary, but it would make sense. 

Unfortunately, having worked at the CDC as an editor, I know that communications never emerge from someone who is willing to speak plainly. Any and all communications pass through multiple levels of review. At each review, things get murkier. The editors fight the good fight, they try to follow the KISS rule, but the higher up the food chain one goes the less willing the powers-that-be are to speak plainly and unambiguously about anything. Endless hours are spent in meetings and fairly soon KISS gets buried under CYA. Your tax dollars at work.

I have said for years that the traffic jam scene in the credits at the beginning of the first season of The Walking Dead wasn't fiction, it was Atlanta on any Friday afternoon. I have also said many times that if there ever was a zombie apocalypse, we'd be fucked. By the time the upper echelons at the CDC finished holding meetings and trying to decide just who was going to do what, it would be too late. Nothing about SARS-COV-2 has changed my mind. The only reason we're not all dead now is this particular corona virus turned out to be not nearly as nasty as it could have been.

WTF is wrong with some people?

Every so often this meme makes the rounds on Facebook. It's usually shared by people waxing nostalgic for the days when everyone's childhoods resembled Beaver Cleaver's or Opie Taylor's, at least in their minds. Not surprisingly, it usually gets labeled as the classic white racist boomer fantasy. You know, the elderly white guy's favorite "memory" -- the good old days when everyone's dad was a genial but strict clean cut dude in a suit, and women knew their place as well as doing all the cooking, cleaning, and catering to their men while dressed in neatly pressed cotton dresses,heels, and a tasteful string of pearls. It goes without saying all the neighbors were white. 

My response to the meme is usually to state I don't miss the good old days at all. I'm old enough that I remember polio, being quarantined for measles, and, when I was older, the gender stereotyping that steered girls into home economics and bookkeeping classes while boys got to take shop or advanced science and math.Why couldn't girls take shop? Because then the boys wouldn't be able to tell dirty jokes or use vulgar language. Shop was where boys could be boys; home ec was where the Future Homemakers learned how to set the table for a formal multi-course meal, right down to the fish forks.

 

Are fish forks still a thing? Did anyone ever actually use them outside dinners served by English aristocracy? Then again, on a less pretentious scale, exactly what is the point of having separate forks for the salad and the main dish? As far as I can discern, the main purpose of having a plethora of silverware on the table, all the various spoons and forks and knives, is to signal that you're doing well enough financially that you (or, more likely, your minions) can lay out an array of metal that will baffle any peasants present at your banquet. 

But, as I was starting to say, it hit me this week that I actually do miss the America I grew up in. I miss the days before the Internet and social media, the days back when stupid people were unable to form echo chambers where they can parrot each other's delusions. You know, the days when if someone was an asshole the only people who had to hear that person being an ass were people who actually knew him. The days when people might have been mean and petty but their meanness and pettiness didn't affect anyone other than the poor saps who were stuck with them through marriage or work. The truly dumb fucks did the bulk of their pontificating through letters to the editor of the local paper. The L'Anse Sentinel used to have a couple regulars who could be counted on to fill page space with their tinfoil hat theories. (For all I know, they still do. I rarely read the Sentinel.) Those people were generally mocked by the community as a whole. They functioned as a source of amusement and not as a symptom of an increasingly dysfunctional culture.

Now, of course, the tinfoil hat types clog up the Intertubes. They band together in cyberspace and encourage each other's lunacy. Worse, after encouraging each other online, they engage in behavior that not long ago would have been unthinkable. Crazy people living in Florida can inspire equally crazy people living in Idaho or Vermont to engage in aberrant antisocial behavior like issuing death threats against politicians or policy makers they disagree with. Harassing the families (including young children) of school board members or public health officials is a recent example. My news feed lately has had way too many stories about the hell school board members are being put through over stuff that shouldn't be issues at all: trying to prevent the spread of infectious disease, for example. There are depressingly large numbers of people deciding to not run for school board again once their terms expire because it's not worth the stress.

Or worse. One of the most disheartening stories recently was about the harassment directed at the school board chair in Hastings, Minnesota. The woman and her family experienced so much vitriol, including credible death threats, that she and her family had to move. And what inspired all the hate? She was the chair of a school board that had voted to require masks for in-school students as part of the school district's response to the COVID pandemic. (Other recent examples of nutjobs harassing school boards include freakouts over library books with adult content -- as if high school students had never heard an obscenity or knew what sexual intercourse is -- or demanding schools eliminate Critical Race Theory from the curriculum when CRT isn't there in the first place. The stupid, it burns.)

 

I keep thinking there are all sorts of things that in the past people might think but they'd never say out loud. Now they don't just say the crazy shit out loud, they rally others to be equally delusional or nihilistic. Social norms have become meaningless to them. You used to have to be drunk or certifiably crazy to yell obscenities at a school board or city council meeting, and for sure you had to be not in your right mind to phone death threats to a neighbor. Not anymore. Now you can do and say whatever horrible thing pops into your head and not only will you not pay a price for it, you'll have fellow amoral, cognitively challenged asshats forming a cheering section.