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Stupidity

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Like garbage, there is an endless supply of this stuff.

A few examples are in order.

The former Acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modly who spent $243,000 of taxpayer money to take a 35-hour journey to Guam just so he could tell the crew of the USS Theodore Roosevelt about how “stupid” and traitorous that beloved captain, Brett Crozier, had been for publicly disclosing the threat the Covid 19 virus posed to the ship’s crew. Modly was lucky to get off the ship and back to shores of the USA where he was forced to resign for being stupid.

And then there was Roseanne Barr talking to Norm MacDonald informing his listeners about what the Covid 19 virus is.

“You know what [Covid 19] is, Norm?” Roseanne explained, utterly awed by her own perception of brilliance. “I think they’re just trying to get rid of all my generation. The boomer ladies that, you know, that inherited their, you know, are widows. They inherited the money so they got to go wherever the money is and figure out a way to get it away from people.”

Yes, we know, Roseanne – take another Thorazine and get some rest, girl.

Let us not forget Bill O’Reilly, the former intellectual stalwart at Fox News, who recently told another Fox News giant, Sean Hannity, that there should be little, or no social concern for those who have died from the Covid 19 virus because they were “damaged” people who were on “their last legs” in life.

This idiot, who lends new flavor to stupidity, actually told Hannity that a “simple man tells the truth.”

And then there is the grizzled old man living in rural America who walks around the local grocery without a mask or gloves coughing through tobacco-stained lungs as he stacks cases of Coors Light into a grocery cart.

“Would you like a mask, sir?” a passing customer asks.

“What do I want a mask for,” the man in the dirty jeans (don’t even think about his underwear) contemptuously replies. “I don’t believe in that hoax-virus bullshit. You must be one them fucking MSNBC Democrats.”

The old man left the store, with half-dozen coughs and million aerosols lingering behind in the store, and got into his 15-year-old F-150 truck. He wondered aloud if he had enough beer to get him through Tucker, Ingram and Hannity later that night.

Stupidity.

It is hopelessly etched into the DNA of humankind.

But it is interesting to think about which dating app could link the grizzled old man with Roseanne.

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Perspective

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The Covid 19 virus claims an American life roughly every 9.5 minutes. Today or tomorrow more than 10,000 will have succumbed to the virus.

That’s a lot of death whose tentacles reach out across a wide spectrum of Americans with grief and other tragic consequences. There’s no way to minimize, much less rationalize, the personal and community harm this deadly virus has inflicted and will continue to inflict upon America.

But with the specter (and fear) of death lingering over the American landscape, there is a need for a world view perspective about the ravages, and, yes, the unfairness of death.

One in four children in Africa will not reach the age of 15 and one in ten will be claimed by death before the age of five.

In 2018, UNICEF reported that an estimate 6.5 million children worldwide died before the age of 15—or roughly 1 child every five seconds. An estimated 5.4 million of these children died before the age of five with newborns representing half of those deaths.

Worse yet, UNICEF reported that 56 million children under the age of five will die before 2030 with half of them being newborns.

80 percent of the 2017 child deaths occurred in two regions of the world: sub-Saharan Africa and Southern Asia.

These children died from lack of access to clean water, sanitation, proper nutrition and basic health services—conditions that are incubators for bacteria, disease, viruses, and a host of other causes of death.

If a child was dying every five seconds in America, would we call it a pandemic?

There is no fair or reasonable answer to this question, especially in a time when a “virus crisis” is crippling the nation.

But it should create a pause for perspective.

Covid 19 is lethal, no doubt about that – but it is the fear the virus produces that is worse than the prospect of death itself. The virus kills in a slow, gripping, crippling sort of way—one can only hope that the supply of morphine is readily available to ease the process of death. “Comfort care,” it is called.

Still, in the back of my mind, there lingers the image of a child—bloated stomach, skin and bones, and worse, eyes that are vacant and lost—to put this “crisis” in perspective. The sub-Saharan African mother will indescribably grieve over the passing of her child, and for all the pre-death misery the child endured. And no one will call it a crisis.

None of us will get out of this world alive.

But, with so many images and stories of death surrounding us as we isolate in the comfort of our homes, a little perspective is in order.

We’re not the only ones suffering from the rigors of death.

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The Legacy

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“Your mother will not be coming home, Son,” Father speaks. “She never regained consciousness last night. She belongs to the unknown now.”

“You and the generation before you, Father, gave us this nightmare,” Son replies. “This will forever be your legacy for all time.”

Father removes his head from his palms, staring off into the early dusk from the porch. He picks up Thomas Wolfe’s book, “You Can’t Go Home Again,” and turns to the page that his Father once read to him.

“Son, let me read to you what Thomas Wolfe wrote to my Father’s generation,” Father says.

“Child, child, have patience and belief, for life is many days, and each present hour will pass away. Son, son, you have been mad and drunken, furious and wild, filled with hatred and despair, and all the dark confusions of the soul – but so have we. You found the earth too great for your one life, you found your brain and sinew smaller than the hunger and desire that fed on them – but it has been this way with all men. You have stumbled on in darkness, you have been pulled in opposite directions, you have faltered, you have missed the way, but, child, this is the chronicle of the earth. And now, because you have known madness and despair, and because you will grow desperate again before you come to evening, we who have stormed the ramparts of the furious earth and been hurled back, we who have been maddened by the unknowable and bitter mystery of love, we who have hungered after fame and savored all of life, the tumult, pain, and frenzy, and now sit quietly by our windows watching all that henceforth never more shall touch us – we call upon you to take heart, for we can swear to you that these things pass.”

Son stares at his broken Father, that familiar wisp of hair casting a shadow over his furrowed brow.

“The broken heart of Mother being gone will never pass, Father,” Son says. “Some wounds heal and scar – others never heal. The sins of this Pandemic will leave wounds beyond healing – and they will be the legacy of your generation, Father.”

Father looks up at Son. He stares deep into the soul of the Son’s wounds.

“It may be the legacy of my generation that we indeed made the storms now tearing our lives apart,” Father says, pausing. “But it will be the legacy of your generation that you did not heed the warnings of the storms approaching.”

COVID 19 will be a terrible legacy for all of mankind—those who made it, those who ignored it, and those who mocked it.

Father turns away.

Pictures on the big-screen television show dead bodies being loaded into a refrigerated 18-wheeler. The bodies will be laid side-by-side before being stacked.

Those images will never pass, not in Father or Son’s lifetimes.

So, where do we go from here?

We survive.

Until the end.

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Perspective.

Uncategorized ,

The Covid 19 virus claims an American life roughly every 9.5 minutes. Today or tomorrow more than 10,000 will have succumbed to the virus.

That’s a lot of death whose tentacles reach out across a wide spectrum of Americans with grief and other tragic consequences. There’s no way to minimize, much less rationalize, the personal and community harm this deadly virus has inflicted and will continue to inflict upon America.

But with the specter (and fear) of death lingering over the American landscape, there is a need for a world view perspective about the ravages, and, yes, the unfairness of death.

One in four children in Africa will not reach the age of 15 and one in ten will be claimed by death before the age of five.

In 2018, UNICEF reported that an estimate 6.5 million children worldwide died before the age of 15—or roughly 1 child every five seconds. An estimated 5.4 million of these children died before the age of five with newborns representing half of those deaths.

Worse yet, UNICEF reported that 56 million children under the age of five will die before 2030 with half of them being newborns.

80 percent of the 2017 child deaths occurred in two regions of the world: sub-Saharan Africa and Southern Asia.

These children died from lack of access to clean water, sanitation, proper nutrition and basic health services—conditions that are incubators for bacteria, disease, viruses, and a host of other causes of death.

If a child was dying every five seconds in America, would we call it a pandemic?

There is no fair or reasonable answer to this question, especially in a time when a “virus crisis” is crippling the nation.

But it should create a pause for perspective.

Covid 19 is lethal, no doubt about that – but it is the fear the virus produces that is worse than the prospect of death itself. The virus kills in a slow, gripping, crippling sort of way—one can only hope that the supply of morphine is readily available to ease the process of death. “Comfort care,” it is called.

Still, in the back of my mind, there lingers the image of a child—bloated stomach, skin and bones, and worse, eyes that are vacant and lost—to put this “crisis” in perspective. The sub-Saharan African mother will indescribably grieve over the passing of her child, and for all the pre-death misery the child endured. And no one will call it a crisis.

None of us will get out of this world alive.

But, with so many images and stories of death surrounding us as we isolate in the comfort of our homes, a little perspective is in order.

We’re not the only ones suffering from the rigors of death.

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COVID-19 and Prisons by Jodie and Billy Sinclair

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According to the Prison Policy Initiative, there are in the U.S. 1,316,000 inmates in state prisons, 615,000 in state jail facilities, 215,000 in federal prison/jail facilities, and 48,000 in youth detention facilities.

The COVID-19 virus will decimate the nation’s prison populations.

Inmates live in confined quarters, either in cellblocks or dormitories. One infected inmate, who will inevitably be infected by either prison staff or family visitors, will trigger an uncontrollable infection spread much like the Australian fire spread last summer. The infection spread cannot be contained in a particular cellblock or dormitory, regardless of how tight it is locked down.

More often than not, prison health care today is provided to inmates by for-profit private medical delivery systems that have little or no regard for an inmate’s medical well-being or physical safety. Essentially, there are no meaningful medical care delivery systems in the nation’s prisons.

Once the virus infection is either detected or strongly suspected, prison staff will immediately start taking sick leave or simply refusing to show up for work. The warden will be forced to declare a state of emergency. The governor will recognize that declaration. The National Guard will be called out to surround and control the locked down prison.

No movement inside the prison will be allowed. Food will be delivered by people dressed in hazmat suits.

As for medical care, medical personnel will refuse to enter the infection swamp. The prison situation will be deemed too dangerous or unstable. The doctors, physician assistants and nurses value their own lives and the lives of their families more than they do the lives of inmates.

There are significant medical geriatric groups and elderly population groups in every community prison. All of these inmates are in the extreme COVID-19 risk categories. None will survive—not one.

Cell bars will be rattled; screams and curses will piece the night; old scores and grudges will be settled; mini-uprisings will occur; the National Guard will quell disturbances with excessive tear gas, pepper spray and live rounds. It will be a nightmare.

Inmates will die by the thousands. Their contaminated bodies will be incinerated.

On the outside, hysterical inmate families will be unable to help their loved ones, knowing all the while that the inmates will die horrible deaths with no medical attention.

The inmates that manage to survive and return to their loved ones will never quite be the same again.

For the most part, the virus nightmare will go unnoticed by the larger free community paralyzed with its own fears, struggles, and grief.

When COVID-19 has exhausted itself, and all the inmate bodies are burned, there may be an official recrimination or two – but probably not.

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Copyright © 2019 Jodie Sinclair| Author