21. Air Conditioning

Years ago, then U of Oregon law professor Charles Wilkinson said that Indians were smarter than to inhabit the lowlands of Arizona. They are unlivable in the summer, so the Indians would, like some early white visitors to the area, spend some wintertime in the low drylands, but would move to higher and milder climates in summer. In the last 100 years, Midwest and northern winters chased white people south, and air conditioning has made many of them year-around residents.

Recently, one of the university or state health department coronavirus wags—and now every college and health department, as well as news service and “think tank,” must have an expert—said that being outside was the safest thing to do with Covid. Masks are great, he said, but the surest way to stay away from contagion is to be in the open air and at least six feet distant from any other human being. Chances of contagion are reduced “almost to nil,” he said.

Another wag—I don’t think the same one, but I can’t keep them all straight—did say that air conditioning was a hazard and not a help to the spread of the disease.  I think that was after the Arizona church that hosted the president was showing off its air purification system.

Now I listen to the news and look at the map. The Covid hot spots are Florida, Texas, Arizona, and California. And in California make that the hot, dry Los Angeles area. Our own Northwest hot spots—Umatilla County in Oregon and Yakima in Washington—say that agricultural workers are involved in the spread. I’m sure that the food processing plants have air conditioning systems that recirculate air and virus, and am pretty sure that field workers, who have the luxury of the great outdoors for 8-10 hours each day, crowd into air conditioned vans on the way back to their crowded dwellings.

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17. Can We Heal?

It struck me yesterday, after my obsessive first morning look at the Coronavirus world in graphs and news stories, that we have slowed the deaths just enough to allow the spread of the disease to remain rampant—or to grow. I saw the angry Texans taunting the mask wearer; they looked like they could eat him. There was a peaceful pic of San Diego tourists with a “wondering” caption—something about what is coming from Arizona. And the constant drumbeat of the many who want to get on with “opening things up.” Some forever Trumpsters follow his economic over coronavirus preaching religiously. But my gut feeling is that many of the young and healthy see no current or future personal threat in Covid-19.

There’s an irony for those my age, who remember a time when we were advised not to “trust anyone over 30.” We thought old people and their outdated ideas were in the way of new thinking on drugs, music, and war.

But the young started dying in Vietnam, and in a strange but now understandable echo of today, black and brown men were serving and dying in greater numbers than were white men. And when, because of a policy of one-year deployments, the draft deferments of young white men could no longer protect them, the old people came up with a draft lottery—the bouncing balls with birth dates on them determined who would go, and in some high numbers be wounded or killed, in Vietnam.

I think it was the women who rose then to defend their sons. I and many young people marched for peace, but there were growing numbers of moms, and soon their lawyer doctor legislator husbands were calling for peace.

Vietnam left 58,000 Americans and over a million Vietnamese dead, and a country fractured. It seemed the old and young never really got together to heal things.

Maybe this time.

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