And the Fever Dreams Have Begun (or Careful with that Axe Eugene)

31 March 2020

Funny stuff has happened recently. By funny stuff I mean my mind has been traveling to weird, weird spaces.  While I have been making sure to get a good night’s sleep, a minimum of 6 ½ hours but usually 7 or more, I have been having the most vivid dreams.

On an average night I have dreams, some odd and some tied directly to the events of the day. Some of them even make their way into become short stories or blog posts.  But the dreams of late have been slowly turning into pandemic dreams. 

I am locked at home.  I am isolated from all but my family.  The news is 80% bad and it is all about coronavirus. I am sleeping more and sleeping after less activity than I would usually have.  No wonder the dark of this world is seeping into my nocturnal life. 

Two dreams stick out in particular. The first was very intricately detailed involving among other things Lansing Community College’s main campus being leveled to become a practice field for the U of M Marching Band.  As God is my witness, I have no idea where that came from.  However, the gist of the dream was that someone I had not seen in years, an old college friend, showed up at my East Lansing home.  Being a good comrade, I agreed to meet with him.

When I left the house and got into my old friend’s car, I was not thinking about the coronavirus.  While my friend lacked symptoms, issues arose.  No matter where we tried to go to grab a beer, every place was closed.  We ended up with a couple of bottles of beer between our legs as we just drove around and talked. When he dropped me off at home my own family wouldn’t let me back in.  They were outraged that I would expose them to such danger. When I awoke, I was in the part of the dream when I was searching for someplace, anyplace, to stay.

Of the dreams the second was the mildest.  It was simple and straightforward.  I had travelled to someplace warm, either California or Florida.  When I got there, I tried to get in touch with people I knew.  To a person, every one of them refused to see me because I was coming Michigan, a coronavirus hotspot. And of course, feeling lonely and dejected I awoke. 

Normally my dreams are messy and weird.  Like I am riding up a Swiss mountain on a narrow-gauge cog railroad stuck in a car stuffed with department store manakins while Barry Manilow is playing “Mandy” on the piano at the end of the car. Or, in the alternative, I am walking down a street and a pair of leathery hands reaches out from under a just slightly raised garage door and tries to drag me under the door.  The hands could be coming from a street grate or from behind a partially open door in a dark alley. For these types of dreams, I usually wake up with blood curdling screams.  Nothing like being on the road with another couple sharing a room when that stuff happens.  

I have always racked up my weird dreams to my own fears and neuroses.  I am afraid of unexpected horror and I am drawn to surreal imagery.  But the recent dreams seem tied to something that I think is broader.  My guess is that my dreams are part of a large worldwide shared series of experiences.

My guess is that other people have now spent several weeks locked up are looking at the people they are sharing their lives with, and have stared at the staples of their diet found in their larders. Having engaged in these multi week reviews some no doubt are contemplating keto diets or Weight Watchers online and/or are drawing up very detailed plans for mass axe murders. There are only so many times you can watch somebody chew like that, or endure them leaving the toilet seat up.

Who knows how many times each of us has been done in by our family members in dreams in recent days (or should I say nights)? Could be days, because my guess is that all our sleeping schedules have gone to odd patterns.  Naps and odd longer blocks of longer sleep periods are probably the norm. But hidden between those snores and chirps of somnambular breathing are images of grisly and macabre dispatch.

My guess is that by the end of April, if not sooner, we will all need some serious mental health therapy.  I would urge all of us to engage in some form of meditations in the meantime to keep you away from the knife sharpener. Be it on your knees in prayer, or in a twenty-minute stroll with headphones listening to the most beautiful playlist you can construct, or sitting on a mat cross legged and emptying you mind, we need to do something to lessen the burden of isolation on our minds.  Pay attention to your dreams. Don’t let the hands beneath the door get you.

Because of the title I am embedding a copy of Careful with that Axe Eugene.  This is for you prog rockers still left out there.  But beneath it I am including a live version of Jason Isbell's Flagship.  Next to John Prine, Jason Isbell is the artist we need now.

To Unfriend or Not

30 March 2020

I was reading a friend's note about unfriending a rabid Always Trumper.  I started this in a Facebook post but decided it really is better as a blog post. 

The problem for my liberal friends with unfriending a Trumper on Facebook, is that we cannot self-isolate politically. It is hard, so very hard, to stomach the subtle and not so subtle, racist, classist and sexist agendas of Trump and the people who have opted to to fully embrace him. But if we give up on talking to pro-Trump acquaintances will our limiting our base for the next election.  If we simply ignore the marginal Trump supporters his breed of hatred and manipulation will continue to win. 

When we lose or fail at something, or when something we value and have worked for becomes unobtainable, we look for someone to blame. Over the past decades very bad choices have been made by the people we, a majority of us, have picked to lead our nation.  Regan’s pushing America toward being a service economy nation was foolhardy.  Who buys something if they are not making the wages a job manufacturing something brings? Clinton’s choice to embrace NAFTA destroyed the middle-class core of nation.  Those good paying jobs making cars and washing machines, they went south to Mexico or across the Pacific to Asia at a fraction of the labor cost.

With such choices being made we have an entire generation whose opportunities to live a middle-class life have disappeared. You don’t get a good apartment in the city or a house in the suburbs floating on the gig economy. If you came into the manufacturing workforce in the 1970s and early 1980s, those secure jobs you thought you had for life, well they went poof.  When they disappeared and you took half pay for a year to disassemble the paper mill or the auto plant for a fixed term of months, your mortgage wasn’t met and the kids couldn’t afford to go to even the safe state university.

In an environment of deprivation demagogues arise. They play on people’s anger and blame immigrants, those racist and thieves, for job losses and stagnant wages. They use code to exploit long extant racial divides.  No, they don’t have to call people wetbacks or ni**ers out loud, they just have to use dog whistle terms about lifetime welfare families, laziness and tropes about people who won’t learn our language. 

Demagogues don’t highlight the tax law and other legal changes that enhance and entrench the positions of those of great, almost unheard-of means. Trump and the people he surrounds himself with don’t talk about the people on the boards of corporations who voted unanimously to shift jobs to just south of our border with Mexico or to relocate the manufacture of washing machines to areas paying slave wages.

And Trump’s posse are doing this with regard to even the current global health crisis.  Just look at the falderol over the name of the pandemic.  Just because we used country names in the past for diseases doesn’t mean we should do so today. In the past we were more openly racist and jingoistic than we are, or should be, today.  Demonizing a country because a disease’s genesis occurred there does nobody any good, Clearly, we weren’t the ones who started this practice, I believe the English referred to either gonorrhea or syphilis as the “French” disease. But it is counterproductive in a world that is much more closely wired together than it ever was before to do so today. 

Trump calling the pandemic the Chinese Flu or Wuhan Flu, is not because the name is being used as a geographic origin indicator, not really.  Calling it the Chinese Flu is nothing but what linguists call using a devil word, in modern terms it is called using a dog whistle.  President Trump clearly has issues with China, some of them valid. Not all of them are, but some of them are. But intertwining this dread scourge of a disease with the name of China doesn’t help fight the virus, doesn’t help save lives and doesn’t do a damn thing that is positive. It will not end abusive Chinese trade practices.

What calling this the Chinese or Wuhan Flu does do is to support the President’s narrative that China is the source of a wide array of problems in our country.  And as pointed out above many of these, if not most of these, were of our own making!

If we walk away from people who buy into this malarkey, we allow them to infect others with this pointless hating agenda.  We have to step up and say the things that need to be said.  We have to say the Chinese lab didn’t release coronavirus into the world.  We have to say it isn’t okay to non-consensually grab women by their genitals. We have to say it wasn’t illegals who stole your jobs, because a. you wouldn’t want the jobs that are taking for the wages they are accepting and b. the jobs you want were stolen away by the minutes of a unanimous board of directors of Westinghouse or GM or about any other corporate concern you can name.  And you have to tell them their then Senator and House member said okay to this.

We have to be there using logical argument in the face of emotional slogans and shallow talking points.  We have to point out a way for positive change. It is okay to silence or unfriend someone who just endlessly spews this vile nasty stuff.  But the folks who say, “Yeah,” or “Me too,” or simply like this venomous and putrid evil, it is those folks we have to focus on and engage with.  They may be people who can be educated.  If we hide our heads in the sand this madness does not end.

Walking with Bob Dylan

27 March 2020

My love she speaks like silence

Without ideals or violence

She doesn’t have to say she’s faithful

Yet she’s true, like ice, like fire

People carry roses

Make promises by the hours

My love she laughs like the flowers

Valentines can’t buy her

On these days of social isolation, I make a choice to walk pretty much every single day.  I walk a great deal and have for a number of years.  The walking makes my cardiologist happy.  Makes me happy too. For most of my life I rode my bicycle everywhere.  Probably did it because I liked the wheeeee feeling I would get going down a hill without having to pedal. In recent years the bike has been in the garage and I have walked.

A couple of days I go I found myself listening to Bob Dylan as I was out walking.  Been a fan for decades.  Call me a casual fan.  I know some fans, yes, I am talking about you Don Gonyea, who have every nook and cranny in their home filled with Bob Dylan bootlegs. My fandom probably started back in the 1960s when I first heard Mr. Tambourine Man.  Couldn’t have understood the lyrics then, but the imagery to my 11-year-old mind was just captivating. From then on, I was hooked. 

I do have a favorite Bob Dylan album; it is Blood on the Tracks.  I have a favorite song, If You See Her Say Hello. First runner up for this award is Girl from the North Country.  Both songs have a wistful longing for lost love woven in to very deftly drafted images of places and of stages of life.  You can’t hear those songs and not feel loss and real longing. When he hits the mark, Dylan drives the ball far up into the air and over the bleachers.

As for concerts I have seen Dylan maybe four, maybe five times.  Five I am pretty sure.  I have seen him with Tom Petty, with Phil Lesh, on a four way bill with Richard Thompson, a solo performance at Michigan State’s Wharton Center and live at Live Aid.  My scorecard is about 50% good versus bad or weird shows. The song I remember most from the concerts was a cover Mr. Dylan sang of Ricky Nelson’s Travelling Man.  He introduced it by saying he was going to sing a Ricky Nelson cover because the then late Ricky Nelson used to cover a number of his songs.  The performance had heart and emotional depth.

In the past few days I have been listening to a couple of Dylan songs as I have been walking.  One is his original version of Love Minus Zero/No Limit.  The other is a cover by Jason Isbell and Sheryl Crow of Everything is Broken.  Dylan was young when he wrote the first song and significantly older when he crafted the second. His wordsmithing on each is just stunning.  The change in worldview is also stunning.

Is there a stronger image of deep abiding love than is conveyed in the first two lines of Love Minus Zero?  “My love she speaks like silence, without ideals or violence, she doesn’t have to say she’s faithful, yet she’s true, like ice, like fire.” I have listened to the song many times over the past few days and each time a different bit of the lyrics sticks in my brain for almost the rest of the day after my walk. Just look at these words and you will see why. I mean defining a love that is true like ice, like fire, two immutable unchanging things throughout time in everybody’s frame of reference, just wow.

The other song has been in my head for a couple of reasons.  First, it is so topical to this moment right now.  I mean think about these lyrics:

Broken bottles, broken plates

Broken switches, broken gates

Broken dishes, broken parts

Streets are filled with broken hearts

Broken words never meant to be spoken

Everything is broken

Seem like every time you stop and turn around

Something else just hit the ground

I don’t know but this pandemic seems to be showing me a great many broken things. From broken health care systems in nation after nation, none of them anywhere near able to deal with a pandemic to a broken political culture in America and to finally a broken spirit of our nation.  Even a nonpolitical outside threat to our lives (literal) cannot unify us.  Everything is broken.

Second, the version I have been listening to just rocks the heck out.  I mean I have seen Jason Isbell in concert and loved the show.  But on the video of Crow and Isbell at Newport, Mr. Isbell just soars on lead guitar.  The duo’s performance, despite the drear nature of the commentary, is a joy to watch. Just seeing how well the song comes off in concert raised my spirits.

Time goes by.  Day 14.  I vow I will work to help flatten the curve.

The World is Alive with Hope

Over the past twenty-four hours a great deal of stuff, let us call it stuff because it is hard to come up with a term that adequately identifies what comes out of the political process, has been happening in Washington. Whether any of what is contained in the “largest, biggest, grandest” bailout ever has any lasting value, only time will tell. 

I have tired of watching the political process grapple with is first and foremost a medical/scientific problem. Watching a bunch of xenophobic, classist, racists try to comprehend what life is like for people who are not wearing $1,500 suits and $250 ties on the floor of the United States Senate is repulsive. And to the Lieutenant Governor of Texas who said his grandparents would be willing to die for the economy, “GO FUCK YOURSELF ASSHOLE”. We aren’t willing to die to further enrich over leveraged billionaires like your native son who owns Landry’s dining establishments. 

To combat the mental health issues that come from rage at the government and from isolation (probably just a me problem for I am a relatively social person) I have been walking. Occasionally, I will talk to a neighbor. No worries, I always maintain the six-foot barrier.  (Why am I reminded of Maxwell Smart’s Cone of Silence?) Mostly I look for signs of spring; early blossoms, buds on trees, the trilling of songbirds.  A good 35-minute walk helps clear my head.  At the end of the walk I feel freed of the baggage of the internet.

One thing I have seen on my walks has struck me, the young are creating images of joy and hope.  Normally, when I see sidewalk chalk art, unless it is somebody doing a reproduction of a Rembrandt painting at the corner of Yonge and Bloor with a hat out for loonies, I just pass it by.  On a normal day I don’t even see colored chalk marks on concrete.  My sense of time has changed.  These days I have lots of times to look at the placement of bricks in a retaining wall, plies of brush cleared out for the spring plantings sitting on a blue tarp and for side walk art.  

All over my neighborhood are positive messages.  “You are loved”, “You can make it”, and “We are in this together,” stand out.  Some pads of sidewalk are covered with hearts.  Some pads are covered with abstract forms.  Each and every segment that has been marked seems to say to me, there is hope.  A mere piece of chalk used judiciously can lift our souls from the realms of fear of the virus and distaste for what is being done and what we must do, to a place of hope and joy. I hope these messages keep coming.

We just have to keep in mind what the scribbler has urged us to do.

We have to believe the chalk messages.

I Miss My Happy Hour

25 March 2020

As an accommodation to older Americans a number of grocery chains in my area have announced senior hours.  In my neighborhood these hours run from 7 am to 8 am.  Today I decided to brave it.  

At about 6:50 am I got to the East Lansing Kroger Store on Lake Lansing Road.  Standing there were two women about 5 or 10 years older than me waiting patiently for the door to open. Both women were observing the appropriate social distancing.  I got out and took a position also observing social distance rules.  Image a triangle with three equal sides of six feet and you will get the picture. My visual scan of the parking lot showed a number of cars, all with one person in each, also waiting for the store to open.  

As soon as the store opened, I allowed the two women to enter and get carts, wipe them down and head in.  As I started through the door, a wiry shorter gentleman basically elbowed his way in front of me and growled through his beard, “What do you think of this bullshit”. Not following social distancing protocols, doubting the real risk to senior Americans of the corona virus, and verbally aggressive even at 7 am-clearly a Fox News fan.

Once in the store it was kind of like smoke molecules moving to equilibrium in a closed box.  For the most part, other that the Billy Goat Gruff I had encountered, people were staying 10 feet apart even in the checkout lanes. Billy Goat Gruff was whipping up and down the aisles like a tornado with viruses spewing out of his spiral, as opposed to trees, cows and cars. 

Save for three single roles of paper towels the paper products aisle was bare.  Chicken and pork chops were in stock so I grabbed some.  However, the meat section was also empty except for the highest priced steak cuts and ground beef raised on an organic farm somewhere outside of Taos or Sedona. The fresh vegetable and fruit aisle had some of each. There was not as much selection as usual but it was adequately stocked.

At checkout the cashier wore disposable gloves.  To what end I wonder for the bagger did not. In 45 minutes, I had replenished my foodstuffs for at least another ten days.  I paid about 5-10% more than I would have at Meijer’s, my store of choice.  However, I kind of thought there would be fewer people at Kroger and anecdotally I had that confirmed.  Talked to a friend who hit the Meijer’s senior hour yesterday and she described the scene as packed.  Packed should not be a word associated with senior hour at the grocery store during a pandemic.

Sort of sad really.  There was time in my life where the only “have to be there event” was set at 5:01 pm on Fridays.  Usually there were libations involved, not virus killing wipes.

Welcome to TAP Air Portugal, please don’t hang up. (Interstitial Spanish guitar playing). Welcome to TAP Air Portugal, please…

24 March 2020

Last night as I lay in bed, I decided to see what was happening with my plane reservations to Europe.  It turns out that my May 1^st flight from Toronto to Lisbon had disappeared.  I had kind of figured this would be the case.  However, the return trip on June 15 is still showing as active.  In all reality I do not need a trip to from Europe to Toronto (of the Great White North) if I don’t have a trip scheduled to Europe.  I note my trip was booked as a round trip fare.

Nowhere on the TAP website can there be found any kind of information as to what to do next.  Nothing on the site stated if your flight is cancelled you will be refunded your money.  Nothing said here is how you reschedule your flights.  The website was in two words, particularly useless.  Many websites during this time of crisis are proving utterly useless. Amazon has been quite robust, but everything else not so much.

Given the immensity of the problem we are facing with the Novel coronavirus I am not really irked at the websites.  The world has changed in the matter of weeks.  The fabric of daily life has gone from a rich colorful tapestry to a faded black and white photograph.  With every cough, and ache and other symptom of being older, your nerves tense and you wonder, “Is this it?” Me, if you would listen to my opinion, I don’t think we are ever going back to the old way of doing things. I think face to face, person to person sales of everything from groceries to prepared foods is changing for good.

At this point I am sitting on the phone (9:30 minutes so far) listening to the above phrase.  My thought is that I will reset my trip to cover the entire fall.  Maybe I will go September 7^th and stay until January 7, 2021. 

All this time alone has given me time to wander around in the boxes of my past, both physically and metaphorically.  Odd things have been cropping up.  One that was kind of amusing was seeing the picture of my myself at the start of all four years at Michigan State.  I had posted this on Facebook about eight years.  Yesterday, or was it today, the evil Zuckerman empire asked if I wanted to repost this “memory.” Back when I posted it the first time, I thought time flew.  Now looking back and seeing it has been eight years since the image was shared, I am so very assured time is flying at a stellar pace.

(I need to note here the Welcome to TAP message has been degrading.  First the P went, it got shortened to Welcome to TA and now it is Welcome to T….  I am assuming it will get to Welcome to …. and nothing more shortly. I digress).

When I look at those pictures, I can tell you which one was the happiest picture.  It is the second from the left, the one with the dark tan and the longest hair.  Gosh, that picture came from the Bicentennial summer.  I was just in my glory from June through mid-September that year. I tanned every day. I read every day.  I went to the bars frequently.  How many times I ended up at Gregory’s drinking 7 pony drafts for $1.00 American.  Just look at how mellow I look in that photo.

Well after 45 minutes the TAP representative answered.  He was very polite and precise.  He explained I could change my tickets without any problem for a flight later in the year.  The gist, and we had a little bit of a communication breakdown here, was that the first leg had to start by December 31, 2020.  I am not sure but I think the travel also has to end by December 31, 2020.  In the alternative I could get a voucher.  This could be used at any point within a year.

I asked the gentleman to transfer me to reservations.  He was very clear his screen would not let him do that.  He could tell me my first flight was cancelled, but beyond that, Nada.  He assured me he would.  I heard the line transfer; I heard the phone pick up and then wait for it, I heard dead air.  Looking at my phone the clock had quit ticking.  Disconnected, aggh. I tried to call back.  I got into some weird queue with no music and not indication the line would ever be answered.  Fifteen minutes of that and I hung up. I will try again later tonight. 

Ah to be young again, with a tan in a bar with seven pony beers sitting in front of me.

Change has Come Today

22 March 2020

For me being confined mostly within the four corners of my home has forced me to find a variety of ways that allow my mind to stay active.  Not all of them have been to my betterment for I have become immersed in a terrible, soapy series of pulp fantasy novels.  About ½ of these tomes of magic and Victorian lust are available through online libraries.  The other half I have been buying from Amazon.  I am also waiting for one of the early Bosch books to become available along with a John Irving book I have not read, on a regional online library.  

Additionally, I have been watching PBS Create, mostly the cooking shows.  This has resulted in my preparation for my wife of French toast and German Pancakes.  A frittata, or the Greek version, may be up next.  I have to be willing to brave the store to get sausage if that is going to happen. Greek pancakes made with yogurt and served with honey and currants looked wonderful also.

I watch the news. In my mind, I don’t see this pandemic lasting less than three months. Additionally, I don’t see it failing to change our world in material ways. The economic pain that is happening is the stuff revolutions are made of.  How we communicate will be different.  How we approach dining out may very well change. I also think there will be a push away from just in time delivery and globalization.  Nations are going to rethink the interconnectedness of our supply chains. 

Personally, there have been some small changes.  I am wearing thick rubber gloves to do the dishes.  My hands are just dry and cracked from all the hand washing that I cannot immerse them in the sink without pain.  I am using hand lotion but it is not keeping up.  My sleeping patterns are shifting. Now I go to bed later.  Still, get up relatively early but I do nap.  

When I look out my window, I see so much less traffic.  What I see are solitary people walking dogs.  Occasionally I will see a jogger.  How long with it stay this way? I don’t know, but I get the feeling we don’t even know how radically this pandemic will change our world.  

Boomers Remember What We Stand For

Grey is this March morning. Five days now inside-a virus is my jailer. I have to get out. This virus is the jailer of everyone I know that is over sixty. Boomers. The freest of all generations must now be locked down for our own protection. I will get out.  I will walk, but I will do it alone and I will keep my distance.

Watching the news, I see Boomers, my generation, still going out to restraints and coffee shops. My heart sinks.  We were the people who marched, protested and sang to bring about peace. We took action to ensure equality and to end harm to others. To those of you sitting there, sipping lattes in busy coffee shops, your actions are violating our code, do no harm my friends.

Remember when HIV/AIDS roared out with deadly ferocity in our prime years of sexual activity?  Remember the tag line? When you have unprotected sex, you are having unprotected sex with every partner your partner has ever had? Well this novel virus is kind of like that.  

For every person you touch and interact with breaking the six-foot circle of safety, (some say ten), you are interacting with everyone they have similarly interacted with over the last 7-10 days. The virus moves quickly and easily.  Such exposure could be deadly to you or someone your love. Change is hard, but life is change.  We boomers, the pig in the python we have been called, are a very social bunch.  Time to move our socializing from face to face to online.

Boomers were all about social justice.  All people should have equal rights; we championed that cause.  In some areas we won. In others we didn’t. We had a corollary mantra, as long as I don’t hurt someone else leave me alone to do what I want.  

Well to my mind flattening the curve is an issue of supreme social justice.  We have hospitals, and we have equipment in those hospitals that can save lives during this pandemic.  However, we will overwhelm the system if we don’t flatten the curve and spread it out over many months. If we all get sick at once, there will not be enough ventilators, or staff, to care for every person needing care. If we all end up sick at the same time, people will die that otherwise would have lived if the curve had been flattened.

Boomers, we were supposed to be the generation of love and compassion.  Boomers we were supposed to be the generation of social progress.  Boomers our songs were filled with mantras of caring concern like, “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother”.  Right now, in order to live out the messages we played at maximum volume in the day, we have to step back.  We have to accept a solo life this season.

As I noted earlier this is being written by a Boomer for Boomers.  A friend of mine, slightly older than me (but who shares a love of Ocean City, NJ) wrote that we grew up in a different time and that the paradigm of life for the young has shifted.  He seemed to assert we don’t understand the generation that has grown up wired from the get go’s paradigm and that they don’t understand our's.  True.  It was the same for us; we didn’t understand the minds and souls of our parents who had lived through the deprivations of, and fought in the horrors of, the Second World War.

Where the generation before us saw the evil in humanity, we saw the hope of brotherhood and love. Where the generation before us saw good in living a regimented and rule driven life in a world with neat and definitive order, we saw the potential in broad freedom for creativity, for discovery, for humanity’s growth. 

Well, right now, right here, this is our last best chance as a generation to show that what we believed meant something. This is where we listen and make our individual choices that add up to a collection generation’s retrenchment into our self-isolation cocoons for the benefit of the world, for the health and well-being of our sisters and brothers. 

Unless you are out of food, stay away from stores.  Unless you really need help, stay away from other people.  There should be no need for police with weapons to be walking our blocks telling us to finish your dog walks and get back in.  We have personal responsibility. The gun thing, this is happening in some European states. Respect the quarantine.  

This moment is where we show those following us what the peace and love generation was about.  By self-isolating we are working toward an ongoing community, toward the survival of our world. Our time is almost gone, let’s show the world we will walk the walk of love and compassion to the end.

I’m leaving the space station for a few minutes

Silver Wings….and Bright Sunshine

17 March 2020

Time now is 4:15 pm.  Based on prior plans I was supposed to be somewhere around Markham, Ontario right now.  In six hours, I was supposed to be getting on a plane for a 7-hour flight to Lisboa, Portugal for 45 days.  Guess what?  Despite my phone and computer giving me alerts about my upcoming flight times and hotel stays I am not going. 

Life is what life is.  We take what it gives and we make the best of it. Today is a sunny day.  The temperature is close to 50F.  I will not obsess with the world’s drama.  I will walk in the sunshine. Today mantra, stay isolated, stay safe, keep the faith. Listen to good music.

Moral Philosophy Gets Real or This is the Biggest Trolley Problem of All

16 March 2020

People who read my other blog know well that I am fixated on moral philosophy, see https://onetruenorthspace.blogspot.com  and search the term philosophy. This morning as I was reading the Washington Post I came upon an article that was so drenched in issues of moral philosophy that I could not ignore writing about it.  I am going to post the link here.  I am not sure if this coronavirus article is free like some of them are. Still, for those of you with WaPo access it is worth the read, https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/03/15/coronavirus-rationing-us/

If you can’t get to the article here is a quote from it that sort of sums up what the whole thing is about.

In the Chinese city of Wuhan, the epicenter of the novel coronavirus pandemic, doctors made life-or-death decisions last month when 1,000 people needed ventilators to support their breathing, but only 600 were available.

In Iran, where numerous high-level officials have been infected, doctors sought unsuccessfully to get the international community to lift sanctions so they could purchase more lifesaving machines.

And in northern Italy, doctors took the painful step last week of issuing guidelines for rationing ventilators and other essential medical equipment, prioritizing treatment for the young and others with the best chance of survival.

Such tough choices could well be ahead for the United States, a nation with limited hospital capacity and grim epidemiological projections estimating that as many as 40 to 60 percent of the country’s population of 327 million could eventually become infected.

****

In an extreme outbreak, rationing would raise tortured questions: Should someone with a terminal cancer or serious heart disease get more or less priority? Should the CEO of a hospital or a health worker be able to jump the queue? What about pregnant women? How should prisoners or undocumented immigrants be considered? All things being equal, would a lottery or coin flip be an equitable approach?

Spiking U.S. coronavirus cases could force rationing decisions similar to those made in Italy, China, by Ariana Eunjung Cha (Emphasis added)

The science is that the novel coronavirus will grow at an exponential rate if we don’t follow the protocols for social distancing. My guess is that we’re are headed up that predicted exponential curve. Why? Well yesterday, as I walked through my neighborhood here in East Lansing, Michigan, I happened to walk by a park.  Multiple families with young children were using the playground equipment, (equipment that could hold the virus for 10 days to two weeks). There were 13 or more people out there-four or five adults and a passel of virus vectoring kids.  Nope, that isn’t social distancing. Photos posted on social media show the bar scene here is East Lansing has been rocking.  Nope, that isn’t social distancing.  Some cities are going ahead with St. Patrick’s Day parades and festivities.  Nope that isn’t social distancing. Well, you will get the gist, Americans are not good at social distancing because we don’t like being told what to do. We are free and we have rights, dabgumit!

So, unless something changes damn quick in a couple of weeks, we are going to be facing a crush of demand on our ICU resources. There will not be enough ventilators to go around. At that point doctors and politicians (and probably insurance company CEOs), are going to be deciding who lives and who dies. Who gets to live is a question of moral philosophy. RATIONING VENTILATORS is the trolley problem in real life.  No humor in it, no wiggle room, some people will live and others are going to die.

Some states have already codified the hierarchy, younger over older, healthier versus sicker.  Others haven’t.  In those states it may come down to who has the best insurance. Or it may come down to who has the closest relationship to the ER doctors in the community.  Or it may come down to the people who are in better shape because they had good insurance over the course of their life, winning out over the poor who are in rougher shape because they had no such coverage. Seriously, in a couple of weeks we may be faced with the rationing of life and death health care.

The author of the article quotes Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist.  The quote is, ““The public will accept triage and rationing if they understand the process, but if it’s secretive or looks like favoritism to politicians or the rich, they will not accept that — whatever the rules are.” I am not sure he is right.  

There are a great number of disenfranchised people in this country. 40% of American’s per an ABC News post cannot withstand a $400 medical emergency. https://abcnews.go.com/US/10-americans-struggle-cover-400-emergency-expense-federal/story?id=63253846  Do we seriously believe that this 40% of Americans are going to sit idly by while grandma is shunted into a corner to die because she is 70 and has had two prior heart attacks?  Are they going to accept the “this will benefit society as a whole”, argument for allowing their loved one to die with just a whimper?  I am not sure, but as divided as we are right now as a people, I don’t think so.

What do we to do to face the question of triage/rationing?  I don’t know.  What I do know is that we had better factor this issue of moral philosophy into our daily mental reflections right now. Why? Because unless we change our ways, it will be the question we will all have face very, very soon. I am not sure, but given who we are as a people right now, the response could be very problematic.

If you want to understand the trolley problem itself here is a good article in the Atlantic, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/10/trolley-problem-history-psychology-morality-driverless-cars/409732/  For those of you who know my future plans the picture on the Atlantic cover sure looks like Tram 28 in Lisboa.

Saving Social Security and Saving the Earth

15 March 2020 (The Ides of March and All)

Part 1: A Homage

Today I start with remembering a wonderful teacher, Audrey Cooper.  Every year on this fateful day for Gaius Julius Caesar she comes to the forefront of my mind. The words that follow are not Caesar's, but belong to Cicero.

O tempora, o mores! Senatus haec intellegit, Consul videt; hic tamen vivit. vivit? immo vero etiam in Senatum venit, fit publici consili particeps, notat et designat oculis ad caedem unum quemque nostrum! 

O times! O morals! The Senate understands these things, the Consul sees them; yet this man still lives. He lives? Indeed, he even comes into the Senate, he takes part in public debate, he notes and marks out with his eyes each one of us for slaughter!

The First of the Orations Against Cataline

This was how day 1 of Latin III began for me in 1976.  I was a mediocre Latin student at best, but what I learned in Latin class changed my life. Experiencing Latin gave me words, and power over words, I had never known before.  And well as a lawyer words were my life. Thank you, Ms. Cooper.

Part 2: That’s Sick, That’s not Funny

I was talking to a friend who lives in God’s waiting room (Florida) last night. We talked about cancelling travel plans, what is going to happen to the supply chain and a great many things of the sort.  One of his closing comments was that this might well change the date when Social Security would go insolvent, extending it out several years.  Depending on how wide spread the swath of damage is, he very well may be right. It is a horrible calculation, but it is a calculation.  This is what you get when you talk to agnostic numbers guys.

Part 3: Damn the Old

The above is a scene from East Lansing yesterday morning.  The photo was taken in the morning in East Lansing, Michigan.  East Lansing is the home of the Michigan State Universe, an institution of higher learning that has suspended all in person classes in favor of online learning opportunities.  Things are a bit in flux right now as to getting the online stuff up and functional.  This comes from the threads I am seeing on Facebook. As a result, students have a little time on their hands.  Also, the weekend before St. Patrick’s Day is often a big drunk time here in college town USA. This weekend is the time for pre-predrinking for St. Paddy’s.

This photo showing people packed together, clearly not practicing social distancing outside a local bar.  The image was forcefully discussed on Facebook.  One statistic I saw, and I am not vouching for the truth of it, is that you have 1/100 of a percent chance to die from the coronavirus if you are in your twenties. I can just hear the wheels turning in those hormone addled minds, “I like those odds.  I am going to the bar.  Who knows maybe the threat of the plague will get me laid”.  I was a student once; I understand the mindset.

The people responding to the post were older and pretty emphatic about how this gathering was ill advised, wrong and an affront to the ideals of the common good. These were people closer to the part of the population where 3-5% of the population may die of the virus. The posters stated the bar owners had a responsibility to the community not to let this happen.  They also indicated that the local governments had a role in stopping it. Someone near and dear to me said, “Well okay, nothing is going to happen to you kid, but what happens when you hug your grandmother?” Yeah, the tagline for coronavirus is, “When you ignore social distancing, the person you touch is touching everyone and everything you have touched since you last washed off with anti-viral cleansing products.”

We live in a system governed by capitalism.  Bar owners owe no allegiance to anything other than the bottom line. I am not making a moral judgment here; it is simply a fact.  Bars will not respond to appeals to social welfare unless there is an economic impetus to do so.  A threat of boycotts might work.  Being fined by the city for not enforcing the ban of gatherings of over 250 people might be a motivator.  But simply saying don’t allow this to happen for the welfare of the older citizens of this city and state, that is not going to motivate changed behaviors.

The city does not know what to do. For all of its disaster planning you can see the wheels of government are struggling.  We know from the science that not transmitting the disease is the way to keep our medical system from failing.  But we are so used to norms of unfettered freedom and individual rights, elected officials struggle to come up with ways to tell people to stay the hell inside and away from other people.  Microbes don’t give a hoot about constitutions, but people do. Sometimes, and it is very rare, your individual rights must be sacrificed for the common good.

There was one contrarian voice among the postings.  It appeared to be from a young woman who posed the question, “Why should we change our behavior when the change only benefits you the old? And you the old are leaving us with a world that may not be survivable due to pollution and global warming.  And you the old are doing nothing about those things that will kill us the young in the long run,” This is not a direct quote buy my remembering of it.  I searched today but could not find it. Clearly, there was an implied argument in the post that the old should die off so that the young can make the changes needed to save the world.

The writer posed a question of true moral philosophy.  Why should I act in a moral way that benefits you, when you will not act in a moral way that benefits us all? My response is this, we all owe a duty to each to behave in a way that promotes the betterment of life.  Many faiths have a creed similar to that voiced in the Christian bible, do unto others what you would have them do to you. The whole goal of this life, while we are in this life is to make things better, not worse. Packing together in a bar line is so clearly a way to transmit the disease it cannot be found to be a moral act. Standing in that line for minutes or hours is making things worse.

Ancillary to this is the argument is another that must be considered.   Not all the old have continued laying waste to the world. Many have fought for years to stop the pollution and the desecration of the planet.  The coronavirus is not something that discriminates against those who are working for good and those who are not. Thus, my young friend you will be injuring or killing allies who have experience and knowledge you need, as well as those active defilers of the earth if such behaviors persist.

Finally, I offer that I came from a generation that wanted mass change, and we marched, and boycotted and wrote letters to try and bring it about. Some change occurred, I note the Clean Air and the Clean Water Acts. But as we aged some lost that vision.  Some grew complacent.  Some just got bogged down in day to day living, inclusive of the bearing and raising of you the voice of the young. There is nothing in history that evens hints that your generation will not suffer the same fate.  So, offing us by intemperate social behavior on your part does not guarantee you stop the apocalypse or create your new Eden. 

I hope you make the decision to behave appropriately. You may only get mild symptoms, but that hug you give your mom or dad while wearing the coat you wore in line as you waited for the bar to open, may change your life and your world forever.  We all owe each other a duty to work for the best possible outcomes.

The Day of the Dog Walkers

14 March 2020

At the end of yesterday the plague map on WILX TV-10’s website showed a jump from two case of the novel coronavirus in Michigan at 25.  The clusters are in the larger urban areas. This is a jump from a report of zero two days earlier.  Given that testing is so limited at this point we can assume the virus has spread much further. The wave is coming.

So it goes.

As the day went on yesterday more and more things closed down.  All the city and township offices in the area are closed until at least April 5.  In my hometown that means the community center and its gym are closed.  The library is closed. Pretty much everything is closed save for grocery stores, pharmacies and gas stations.

Today’s morning chores are done.  I have fed three out of four people and washed the dishes.  Put ‘em away too.  During all that time I have had a eye on my big bay window. Since I got up at 9 am there has been 1 car pass by the window.  Now mind you mine is not a busy street.  However, on a Saturday morning there is usually a steady stream of people headed out in their vehicles to do the errands they cannot do during the working week.  Three hours, one car.  The world has slowed.  

What I have seen are dog walkers.  The canine crowd has been passing by in clumps two and three people, usually with one dog.  A couple of solitary dog walkers have passed by. Up here in the north country the air temperature is 34F.  Kinda cold. Still, dogs must be walked.  I doubt people would be leaving their homes at all except for Fido’s need to respond to nature’s call. Me, I will leave for my 30 minute exercise walk a little later in the day.  I will keep six feet away from all other humans.

I am sure people will turn to shopping to avoid going store crazy.  Me, I have my writing and the trashy books I am readings. But it you want to get out you are going to have the choice of a visit to a grocery store or a mall.  I don’t think the malls have either voluntarily or by government fiat closed yet.  It maybe coming.

The Feds have advised us to shop at hours when people will most likely not be at the stores to minimize our breaching isolation.  This raises a question that is akin of that scene in The Princess Bride where the two characters are dithering over which cup contains the poison.  With a great portion of the workforce off what time is the best time to go shopping? 

 If I am thinking like I should I know most people go shopping on Saturday morning or Sunday afternoon.  Should I think that all those people will heed the government’s warning and go shopping on a weekday morning.  Ergo, the stores will be empty so I should go shop today.  Or should I assume that will ignore all advice from the government and still go today.  Or maybe ½ will change their plans and maybe if I go at 2 pm there will be a lull in the foot traffic in the stores.  Well, anyway you see how far down the rabbit hole this could go. 

It is a grey day out my window.