137. Random facts and thoughts

The Floridian running for governor in Texas says his wife was vaccinated; but he’s not. It’s a matter of personal choice. He’s now choosing to go to the hospital and take the antibodies plus ivermectin and hydro-whatever—the other drug that has not been found effective. The press release said that his wife tested positive too, but said nothing about her going to the hospital. 

 

A healthy, 67-year-old member of Idaho Lt Governor’s task force on educational indoctrination—formed to root out leftist teaching in Idaho schools, died of Covid, according to Boise papers. He told people he was “vaccinated in Christ...”

 

A reporter in Germany says wearing masks on trains and indoors is automatic, as is taking them off outdoors. In America, the left wears masks indoors and out; the right not at all.  

 

Some on my side of the vaccination divide ask that the unvaccinated not be allowed into hospitals when there’s a shortage of rooms. Some say not at all; “put them in their own tent outside,” said one. 

 

My grandson asks whether anyone has kept statistics on the numbers of Republicans and Democrats who have contracted Covid. How many Republicans have died? 

 

In today’s New York Times, two prominent Republicans call for moderation and common sense, for a new collation of Centrist Democrats, Independents and moderate Republicans to make sure that those in control of the Republican party are defeated in the short run, and a stronger, moderate Republican party emerges in the future. They are backing Liz Cheney, who has a challenger endorsed by the former president. I wonder how Covid and Trump will work in her primary campaign.

 

Masks—what’s so hard about them? Last winter I didn’t get a cough or sneeze; friends and doctors remarked on the same. But Masks have become a symbol, divorced from their purposes or even the ease or unease of using them.

 

When I was young—before 21—we found it easier to buy beer at 7-11 stores than most others. Occasionally, the San Diego paper would say that a fine of $100 or $500 had been levied against a 7-11 store. We chuckled at that, computing the amount of beer sold to minors that it would take to pay the modest fine. When I walk into the local grocery or hardware store and see that all workers and most customers are maskless, it makes me wonder…

 

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63. Guns, Germs, and Steel

Day 14—My final day of quarantine

 

What a privilege, midst the pandemic and worry about upcoming holiday spread, to have time and space to think and write. Yesterday, a major worry slowed when granddaughter Oriana decided not to come home from Portland for Thanksgiving. It was a heartbreaker—and a heart-saver.

 

The election over, the disease has swelled across the headlines. I read and worry about Tribal people in the Dakotas and the Southwest, and admire the work they and others are doing to slow the pandemic. I cannot fathom Texas and South Dakota governors and their insistence on their own version of normalcy. Is it a comment on our times that studies showing that bars and social gatherings can be super spreaders while schools are not are routinely ignored? 

 

There’s at least some hope that history will save a bigger place for this pandemic than it has given to past outbreaks. My history classes, from elementary school through college, had little room for them. I remember something of the 14^th century Plague, but it was a footnote; I had no notion that it killed a third of Europe’s people. 

 

In early grades we learned Columbus and Washington and Jefferson—and maybe Squanto and Pocahontus—and when thought old enough to understand, Lincoln and the end of slavery. No one knew—or dared say—that diseases had killed 80 or 90 percent of the Native Americans. I’ve only learned details of the 1918 Influenza that killed 600,000 Americans this year, in he shadow of Covid-19.

 

My “long reading” these 14 days has been a rereading of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel. Diamond sets out to explain why European civilizations were so successful—dominant—in the world, while other civilizations on other continents rose and fell, but never attained the global influence and power that those on the Eurasian continent have gained and still hold. Guns and steel have played their roles, but germs have often been the deciders. Most importantly, European diseases—smallpox, measles, typhoid and others—devastated American Indians and the civilizations they had grown. 

 

Pandemics don’t promote heroes and statues, and their deaths can’t be made into romance. They brought us witches and trials, strange religious practices, and the trick of hiding historically behind wars and conquests. 

 

This exercise is my own modest attempt to remember this one.

 

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