Muh Muh Muh My Corona (virus)

You keep saying this, as if those of us who want to keep the restrictions in place a bit longer don't have sympathy for them as well. The only difference is, those people's lives will recover in a matter of weeks...someone who gets a debilitating or deadly case of coronavirus won't be as fortunate.

As for your earlier question, you said how can people get this by staying at home. That's right, they can't. That's the point of allowing them to stay at home by having their job closed down for a few more weeks until more testing can be set up.

 

COVID-19: Free Testing

Tests are available free to every person in LA County. What am I missing?

 

Today's Washington Post poll showed 75 percent of respondents said they were going to keep on staying at home as much as possible for at least another month, reopenings or no. That's the problem for the businesses Poin cites, not the government orders themselves. Hard to stay in business with one-fourth as many customers as you used to have.

 

Polls also said that Hillary Clinton was going to obliterate Trump on election night in 2016.

If the tailor opens up, and nobody shows up for business, oh well. But the tailor would at least like a fighting chance.

 

Try to get one.
Then try to get a second one.
And a third one.
Because, as the racist traitor in chief was shocked to discover, you can not have it one day and test positive the next.

 

I used to have a rule here as I would get into arguments that if you can't make your point in five posts, you are never going to make it. I let that one get away from me here.

Good luck to everyone here. Stay safe. I'll come back to this thread in a week or two.

 

Michael, I don't know that I'll feel comfortable again in a bar, and I never liked big sweaty crowds to begin with.

I read something yesterday about the advent of robotic waiters and busboys. We really are through the looking glass.

 

Yeah, but that was the front end of the pandemic, when "holy shit, we all might die" was a legitimate fear.

Now, we know a couple things:

1. The virus in NYC was zipping around, on its way to killing people, well before anyone did anything - wash their hands, not touch their face, anything. January. February. Nobody knew, including NYC officials. We struggle to get over this because, as Americans, we've been trained to blame someone - blaming is all we do almost all the time anyway - and we've been trained, too, that bad things, including death, happen for reasons that, if we'd just been smarter, we would have avoided. (As a side note, death in America is such a scary thing - like, people view it as a moral failure, dying - that we have all these "out of sight, out of mind" homes where people eventually die without distracting us from...whatever productive thing we're supposed to do in that second.) At any rate, getting over the fact that we didn't know would help, because we'd stop fixating on some gloom we couldn't prevent and figure out, instead of how not to die, how to live as a nation.

2. Holy shit, we're not all going to die. And once people realize that, they get a little bored with meager living - the exception to this is generally fabulously rich people whose lives haven't changed much at all but like lockdowns because liking them reflects well on their virtue and reduces the already-tiny chance they have of dying from it - and want to do a little more than they were. We know this in part because, unlike our fixation with death in Italy two months ago, we've largely ignored that Spain, UK and France are just as bad. Because the shit hit the fan in the US, that's natural. Things always look different when you're in the midst of a storm than when its clouds sit just off the ocean, black as night. It's human to adjust to the shitstorm and gradually feel better about operating in it.

3. I think scientists, doctors may struggle to see all that because this their world war, the event of a lifetime, the thing they trained for and thought about, perhaps their entire careers, and it will inevitably shape their characters in the best ways. They're all-in, 100 percent go, risking lives and reputations to save lives and even in the midst of the terror and sadness that brings, damn right, it has real meaning. Capital M meaning. Journalists benefit from that, too. It may be hard for both groups to understand that, guess what, people don't love to be told to stay home, like children, because the best way they can help is to watch TV, drink, get takeout and hang out on Zoom. People don't derive meaning from sitting around on their ass, collecting government checks and watching doomy news all day long. They don't want to stay the fuck home. It's not life. More to the point, it's not American life. And while I'm more comfortable than the least comfortable with restrictions, I get that feeling. Or I can imagine it. It's not just a financial bottom line - it's purpose.

So there's protests, pushback, anger, all that. That's democracy in a geographically huge, heavily populated, multicultural nation. And elected leaders - not public health scientists - answer to that, and adjust accordingly, even, at times, in ways scientists don't prefer.

Honestly? I think a lot of national, Web-tethered journalists, products of privileged backgrounds and institutions who have never worked in another industry once they become journalists, struggle to grasp this. That's what professionalizing journalism - life in general - gets you: A class of folks who are out of touch with anything but piety for the masses - be it real piety or false piety - and operate out of some broad, secular humanist (almost religious) concern for the world.

FWIW, it's true among pastors, too. A lot of wealth and privilege there, a genuine piety, but an introversion to the world as it's actually lived by many of their parishioners. The broad American church - excluding the black church, which is place a vibrant place of shared pain and hope - doesn't really live on the edge of anything. It lives in disturbing luxury, seeking brief, preferably-life-affirming encounters with authenticity.

 

First, I believe tracing is going on in many places.

Second, whoever you want to put the packing house outbreaks on, me calling it a missed opportunity and say we missed it - as in, we dropped the ball as a nation - is not bullshit, based on the rest of your post. I agree that packing industry should have been better safeguarded.

Third, of course there are, at this point, many translators. We should have leveraged them. We also need to start teaching as many Americans as we can Spanish. We have to be fluent both ways. We're not, and so long as our public schools and political leaders make little effort to demand immersive English of its new citizens and undocumented immigrants, then we might as well teach both, to everybody, starting young. (I could write a long time on this, as it dovetails, to a great degree, with my post to Gee on a class of Americans who operate out of piety without identification.)

 

What do you tip them, a can of Valvoline?

 

Depends on the bar. I tend to not frequent the sorts of places where those crowds gather. Thankfully there's enough choice in my burg. The college kids have their hangs. Us olds have ours. Sometimes they intersect, but I sort of went out of my way to go to the place with fewer people where I can watch a game in peace. Anyway.

 

What am I being selfish about?

I think California is full of progressive wealthy people mostly because:

A. It's where Hollywood is.

B. Silicon Valley

C. It's beautiful and the weather is nice in lots of places.

D. The servant help there is cheap and non-intrusive.

In theory B could change because you can do the shit they do in Silicon Valley really anywhere - Austin, Little Rock, Boise, anywhere. But it started there, and rich people like oceans, nice weather, being around each other, etc.