The Partisan Divide on Issues

[Skabungus]

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.