The Coronavirus

[pbrower2a]

My BA is in economics... but I recognize the medical danger of COVID-19 (mass death and possibly crippling effects among many survivors) and recognize how disruptive those would be. (As a moral person I consider pointless death a pure abomination, so economics cannot refute moral law).

I am satisfied that America will get back to normal after much of our economic and social activity is back to normal. I find it unnatural to wear a mask, but I look at a mask as a means of allowing me to do much that I consider necessary and desirable under the circumstances. If you have a leg injury, then crutches might give you more freedom than you otherwise might have.

Once COVID-19 is gone it is gone. All that will remain of it will be some memories of a very bad time, a time of fear and hardship.

"Ring around the rosies, pocket full of posies, achoo! achoo! all fall down!"

It is no more innocent than "Lizzie Borden took an ax, gave her mother forty whacks..." which is also documented only from the late nineteenth century, but then on a current event.

Ring around the rosie,
[refers to the rosie-red (or purple-ish) round rash marks on the skin —one of the first signs a person had the plague]
A pocket full of posies;
[one of the superstitious ways used by people in the Middle Ages to try and fend off the plague was to stuff their pockets with posies (flowers)]
Atischoo, atischoo,
[sneezing was also an early sign of the plague if it was a pneumonic plague; however, not all types of plague involved sneezing]
or, Ashes, ashes
[the dead were often cremated]
We all fall down.
[most of the people strickened with the plague died]

http://www.sewerhistory.org/miscellaneou...the-rosie/

Death from plague was far more public than death is today. This said, modern imagery of death comes heavily from medieval reality when, during plagues, death was not simply someone dying as one expects now -- some old person approaching an anomalous age. There have been people who I thought would live to 100 yet did not. Among the more prominent, Billy Graham, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Carol Channing, and Doris Day. Some old person goes from seemingly hale to having a fatal stroke or heart attack, or someone dies in old age of cancer. Unless one works in a hospital or nursing home, one rarely sees death. I did see a dead woman on the pavement of her driveway once in my neighborhood... she had apparently been out to take care of her flowers. Beautiful flowers for their own sake, they weren't the ones that one associates with the plague. She was in her eighties. Maybe the last thing that she saw was her delightful garden upon which she had spent so much time and effort. I can easily imagine worse. She seemed to be a good person, and if there is a heaven, she is likely enjoying a delightful garden.

We all deal with death at some point, and we see it in one or more of its attributes. Hers is the only dead body that I did not see in person a funeral parlor or in a photograph. I was not around to watch someone die, but I have been around people on the last day of their lives with the knowledge that they would soon die. Of course we know statistics all too well, and COVID-19 gives statistics instead of visions of people dying horribly.

My apology in case this is too morbid for your taste. 80,000 deaths due to the incompetence of a political leader or of a the incompetence of a senior military officer in a bungled war or as the result of a callous disregard for the lives of workers in some commercial process offends my sensibilities. So does one murder.