The Partisan Divide on Issues

[pbrower2a]

(02-08-2022, 02:13 PM)Skabungus Wrote: It's so hard to come back after several years and jump back in on threads that have progressed on into the desert leaving a myriad of dead end trails, gulches and asides.  

Instead, I'll tell you a little story.  

My dad died in January.  He was 85.  He had a good life and lived large for most of it.  His last 26 years were spent golfing and traveling the world with my mom, and then later, a girlfriend.  The past decade he spent in a golf course community in Florida.  Eighteen holes a day, and steak and lobster or other rich dishes along with an ample supply of well aged scotch.  He was the poster child for Silent generation dreams come true.

That is never easy. I lost my two parents of degenerative diseases... a mother from Parkinsonism and a father from small-vessel decay. My mother hated the nursing home and did everything possible to get away from it but ended up in an expensive full-care place where the care was not so great. My father and I had to help feed her because the place was understaffed. Both of us did what we could to keep her spirits up. My idea was to have her walk as much as possible so that she would keep physically active and avoid bedsores. She of course died. I continued in largely a near-full-tine caretaker role with my father, who did fall short of having the body for the golf course and the means for surf-and-turf. I encouraged him to get back in touch with church and (maybe I regret that I failed on this) to reconnect with a Masonic lodge -- or at least another one. I made sure that he could take trips.. .I wish that there had been a Detroit Tigers/Red Wings/Pistons game when those teams were still good. But we did go to Grand Rapids and the Thumb. He distrusted big cities as Sodom and Gomorrah (OK, even Detroit has good places to go, like the areas around the sports venues). I made sure that he took his pills, and I gave him his shots for diabetes. But one day he took a tumble while going to the garage for a soft drink, and he broke his pelvis. Then it was off to the hospital and a couple months of recovery. 

His mental condition deteriorated rapidly, and he lost his ambitions. He had been a manager, and one of the basic rules is that you never tear someone down in the presence of others. On Opening Day of the Detroit Tigers' season he called me and asked me to watch the game with him. Justin Verlander was pitching in a typical game for someone headed for the Baseball Hall of Fame , and the game had its interesting play. He demanded that I take him home right then and there even though such would have been medical abuse. I refused. My uncle and his younger son was there and they got to hear him damn me as a coward  and an ingrate. I still had some hope that he might recover, but I would have to rearrange things at home so that he could live there, such as turning a dining area in a split-level house into a bedroom for him. That is tricky, but not impossible. But I could watch him from where I was on the computer and if he did get through the front door, then if he had any problems we have nosy neighbors. 

At age 60 I suddenly had an abusive father, and that was not easy even if he was at a nursing facility. Nursing homes do not perform miracles, but they can certainly drain bank accounts. I had to pay out my life savings to meet the demands, and from then on I have endured the nightmare of being poor in a society that values only the ability to be a Big Spender. My chances of starting over were practically nil... sure, I would tell a recent grad of a fine college  that working in a fast-food place until one gets the first job with real pay is not a bad course of action, but that is a first job and not what one wants as one's last job when one is 60. Poverty for anyone who has known anything else is a nightmare.        

Quote:A hard right conservative his entire life, he was convinced all this hubub about covid was just that.  Liberals trying to use the "new flu" as an excuse for overreach, more regulations and the like.  He'd parroted about every right wing dismissal you can imagine, comparing the new plague to ... a flu, a cold, and yes, even a snake or spider bite.  He was part of that "there's a pill for everything" generation that simply didn't believe someone should have to modify behavior to stay safe.  Medical science had kept him alive since is open heart surgery at 60 and every time he'd developed another disorder, well, the good doctors had a pill for him.  Certainly this covid thing would run the same course.

Yes, many of us were ill-prepared for it because COVID-19 sounds like the sort of thing that ravages poor people (by local standards, which is really poor) in Third-World countries in which sanitation is poor and government services are dreadful. Except for pneumonia associated with terminal diseases such as cancer and congestive heart failure or with such 'medical scum' -- doctors are terrible snobs about such people as IV drug users and late-stage alcoholics, COVID-19 was perfectly made to fit a culture of craven denial as America is. A corrupt government in which the leader is far better at grandstanding than at finding workable solutions  (yes, I put much blame on Donald Trump for bungling the response) was at part at fault, but so is a mass culture that pushes superstition, conspiracy theories, and medical quackery.  

Quote:I spoke to my dad in April of 2020 when he came up to see us here in Michigan.  He was good enough to grace his children and grand children with a one day visit every year.  He'd called on the phone to say he'd be by in the morning to see us, and I had to tell him that we'd been exposed to covid and that were he to come by, he'd have to wear a mask and sit outside with us.  Unacceptable.  Totally unacceptable in his eyes, so he skipped the visit opting instead to drop some presents for the grand kids on our porch and leave.  For the next two years every time I'd speak with him, I'd be brow beaten for having bought into all the liberal fear mongering around covid.  

The sad thing is that we liberals were right. We had practical solutions, like masks, hand-washing, social distancing, and disinfecting surfaces. OK, the latter was excessive and ineffective. 
 

Quote:Covid killed his disbelieving ass on January 20, 2022.  Actually it just put him in the hospital on life support.  I had to fly down and end the ordeal by reading his living will to two doctors and the head nurse, twice.

Getting his affairs in Florida squared away meant I spent about 4 days in the palatial surrounds of his golf course community.  I couldn't find a mask on a face.  There was much talk about everyone that was dying.  There was lively discussion about the amazing benefits of the monoclonal antibody treatments (because, there is a treatment for everything you know) and how everyone seemed to know someone who'd survived it.  Yet they were dropping like flies.  On my drive back to Ohio, with my dad's girlfriend, we got a call from her Saturday golf gang.  Three of the seven had tested positive and the other four didn't feel well, but weren't going to get tested, because, you know, the lines.

And I am one of those people who compared contracting COVID-19 to enduring a rattlesnake bite, with the huge difference that you and the rattlesnake will back off if possible. Such is not so with the two-legged rattlesnake who can transmit COVID-19 without a bite. The mortality rate, I discovered, for those who got COVID-19 was about the same as for those who endured a rattler bite. I turned 65 almost right in time for anyone who was my age or older to get inoculated. I was able to use psoriasis as an excuse because it is an auto-immune disorder. 

I am one of the most militant people around about COVID-19 shots. Maybe I will live to a ripe old age and start living well with the aid of some rich widow (at least by my standard). Surf and turf might be a rare treat, but not having to question the wisdom of buying something other than the cheapest item on the menu at a middle-priced restaurant will be nice again. So will having a car that I am not delaying repairs on because I am broke and getting into trouble for. Who knows? Maybe I might take in some foreign sights.   

Quote:WTAF.  I still don't know what to make of it.  I'm told the same is the case in many of Florida's retirement communities, and we all know it's the same in many rural communities where fear trumps science.  The only words that come to mind are mass psychosis, or mass denial.  It's something I've really never encountered before, at least on such a scale.

I am one of the few people in my community of my age who isn't locked up in jail who has never been to Florida... but it is rural, and I see plenty of Trump banners, rattlesnake flags, and Confederate flags. Paradoxically this community made much of its heritage of fighting on the Union side in the Civil War, so the Confederate flag seems not only offensive but also absurd. And, yes, even banners that read F--K Biden. The more polite ones replace "UC" with a US flag. Some make no substitution.


(OK, here's a rattlesnake flag with which I have some solidarity even if I am not gay):  





OK, I have been gay-bashed, so you can imagine which side I am on with homophobia. It's not my responsibility to prove that I am straight, and I would rather be gay than a gay-basher. At least homosexuality is legal and consistent with a Good Life.  

Quote:I work with a lot of wildlife biologists.  Covid never comes up, because there is nothing to say.  It's obvious.  Just like EHD, or Chronic Wasting Disease in deer, or whorling disease in trout.  It runs it's course.  The weak, the aged and the ill equipped are culled from the herd.  Nature takes its course.  When covid comes up someone will say, "well, we all know what it will take for it to end", which is kind of a joke, because it never ends, it only lessens.  Natural selection is an ongoing process.

...Stupidity has never been a survival value except perhaps under a totalitarian regime in which thought is an act of resistance to tyranny. 

Quote:My son just got over covid.  My daughter had it last May and September.  No long term effects for either.  My ex wife and I have both avoided it by social distancing, masking up and getting all our shots.

I don't really have too many illusions about where this is all going with regard to covid.  The disease will do it's thing and then fall back into the background along side antibiotic resistant TB, the flu and a few others.  It wont be gone, but it wont be a global killer forever either.

They are lucky to have no long-term effects -- or at least none yet detected. 

Among those are:

long-term organ damage
diabetes
cognitive loss (yes, one gets stupider)
sexual dysfunction
stillbirths

Cancer and birth defects are yet to be established, but I would not be surprised.  
 

Quote:I do have questions about what the reaction to covid says about our future.  It is not simply America.  My friends in Europe share similar stories.  

So I've told you a story, and I've not proofed a word of it.

We have as a country made an investment of nearly one million lives in a harsh lesson about smug rejection of science and medicine. People have died because they rejected even the simplest and safest way in which to prevent COVID-19 or make its effect trivial. 

Yes, this country has some very creative, hard-working, rational people... but it also has its dolts. Just as damaging are those with selective blindness. COVID-19 has killed like a badly-bungled war, and many of us excuse those who diverted us with some miracle treatment such as monoclonal antibodies (a desperate solution), a horse de-wormer, and all sorts of quackery. Even faith healing. COVID-19 will enter the collective lore of the American experience. A disease that killed more Americans in one day than did either the Pearl Harbor attack or the 9-11 atrocity in one day should be an object of vehement hatred. 

COVID-19 has yet to show its full cultural effect... but it will have one. I wonder what equivalent we will have to 

Quote:Ring around the rosies,
A pocket full of posies, 
Ah-choo, ah-choo
All fall down!