It's History, Write It Down

Earlier, in my regular radio career, I was something of a known quantity in the community. Because of that, I was sometimes asked to speak at Elks Club or Rotary luncheons. But I never had the horsepower to be invited to address a high school or college graduating class, and with no children of my own, I wouldn’t have felt qualified anyway. But this COVID year is an exception, so here are my inspiring words for you young whippersnappers.

You may be tired of hearing, “We’re all in the same boat.” As has been said, we’re all in the same storm, but many different boats.

Suppose you’ve been crammed into one small boat with your own family for two months and simply want COVID to be over, which it won’t be for a while. There are things you can do with this time. It may be your first rodeo, to mix metaphors a little, but it is not this country’s, nor the world’s. You can dig into history and see how folks handled the last comparable pandemic – the Spanish Flu of 1918, and especially the years that followed it. It did end, and people returned to a version of what we would think of as normal.

Even in your own family, you may have ancestors who lived through that  pandemic or other major events. Now, it’s you who are living through history and have a story to tell to future generations. If you don’t already have a journal, think about starting one.

\Write about not just what’s physically happening in your life, but how you feel about it. You may think you have nothing memorable to say, or don’t think of yourself as a journal-ist, so to speak,  but your words will increase in value with time, and may be precious later to your descendants and others studying history. Even now, though, it will have value for you, as the mere act of putting it all down will help you process what’s going on, and you will think of our current trial as an experience rather than just a pain. Write for yourself first, which is the best way to tell your story.

Be aware that as you get older, you will condense, and even revise, history in your head. With a journal, you can go back and see what you really did and felt at the time, which could be something of a surprise, as you may discover it didn’t happen as you remember it at all.

If you do start a journal, I’d suggest hand-writing it or printing it out periodically, as you don’t know what electronic media or software (or whatever) there may be in the future that no longer supports, as they say, what you’ve done.

So go forth, sons and daughters, and those in between -- and oh yeah, put your mask on first.

Rebuilding the Anthill

Once, I accidentally kicked over an anthill in the backyard. It wasn’t complete destruction, though the damage was significant. Almost immediately, the ants came out and began the process of rebuilding. If I were their size, it would have seemed like a monumental task that would take a long time.

Now I am no entomologist, but it certainly appeared as if every single ant was involved in the repair work. There were no ants hanging back, as in, it’s not my job, it doesn’t affect me, it doesn’t align with my goals, or I’m being deprived of my Constitutional rights. They were all busy carrying whatever they needed to repair their home. I guess the only ant not visibly working was the queen (OK, she really did have another job!).

I may be romanticizing a bit here, but all those ants seem programmed with one purpose and one agenda. We are not quite like that, but situations come up when we need to be. The last big thing that seemed to involve most everyone in this country for a long period of time was World War II.

Our current pandemic is not just about testing, tracing, mask-wearing, social distancing, staying home or going out again. It’s about logistics and distribution. The swabs are over here, the reagents over there. Some states have more than enough personal protective equipment and others don’t. People are in five-mile food lines in Texas while milk is being poured out on the ground in California. Hogs are put down in Minnesota without being turned into food, because the farmers can’t feed the animals while the meat can’t be processed, and if growing crops doesn’t pencil out on some level for the agriculture folks in Kansas, they don’t get picked. I’ve heard that the military is really good at logistics. Why haven’t these forces been mobilized on a national level, and someone with military experience put in charge of logistics and supply-chain repair?

Even when it comes to distributing relief money, it still takes months for the government to actually put it into everyone’s hands. At some point, there will be a COVID vaccine, and hundreds of millions of doses will be available. How will all that be distributed, and who will get it first?

COVID is not a drill, or a conspiracy, or a competition, or some other country’s fault. It’s an emergency happening right here, right now, and we haven’t really been acting accordingly, especially at the highest levels. Those of us who have anthills in the backyard might learn something about how things get done.

Unmasked Marauders

Last week I saw TV coverage of protesters outside a state capitol building. One of these folks, not wearing a mask, was a man carrying a sign with a message to the effect that it was his body and the government couldn’t tell him what to do with it. I thought, geez, haven’t I heard that somewhere before?

What do you want to bet that this fellow is in favor of seeing the Supreme Court strike down Roe v. Wade? Yet, I’m also willing to bet that if his neighbor’s house was damaged by a tornado, he would rush right over to help out

The coronavirus is pushing us to behave in ways that go against human nature. Staying home doesn’t feel very heroic. If we do go out, we are still asked in many jurisdictions to wear at least a cloth mask, not to protect ourselves from COVID but to protect others from US.

The preacher who says that if God wanted us to wear masks, we would have been supplied one at birth does have a point, but for the moment, it seems to be prudent to wear one when we’re out and about. Even as things start to re-open, following this simple rule is the least of our burdens. There’s a lot of debate about whether masks are sanitary, but it seems they are better than nothing. We could have a spare or two available if we need to clean or wash the one ye’ve been wearing. I’m not into shaming people not wearing them. But circumstances may force these non-participants to change their ways, even those in the White House.

A couple of things I have noticed: Though a mask doesn’t cover the eyes, it seems to contribute to tunnel vision. When we’re in a supermarket, we may not always see the folks on either side of us while we are on our particular mission. While masks are  uncomfortable, unlike medical workers, bus drivers, and store clerks, most of us have them on for relatively short periods of time for those external trips.

There is something almost Middle Eastern going on here. We Americans, especially we men, get to feel like  those women in strict Islamic countries forced to cover most of their faces. I have a little joke that those women could teach their counterparts in less-restrictive regions a thing or two about eye makeup, but it must be awful having to wear what some like to call a bee suit.

To get back to those protesters hereabouts, however, they can say all they want about being patriots and how forced mask-wearing interferes with their Constitutional rights. All I can say back is, when it comes to defending the Constitution, there must be better battles to pick than this one.