Muh Muh Muh My Corona (virus)

Indeed. One gleeful huzzah after another.

 

I guess he won’t be invited to the White House in the near future ...

 

Well no shit.

We are four plus months into this, and is there any change? Any improvement?

I keep shaking my head, every time I read about something being delayed for a few months. Fall sports are now spring sports.

If anyone sees the path to how this virus will be handled successfully on Jan 1, let me know.

 

the problem isn't the failure to develop a national testing and tracing infrastructure or to plan for the reopening of businesses and schools or the time wasted since January on the politics of idiots, the problem is the criticism of the failure to develop a national testing and tracing infrastructure or to plan for the reopening of businesses and schools or the time wasted since January on the politics of idiots.

 

Vote better.

 

First response, since I'm pretty sure I fall into the part of the SJ venn diagram that you see as "High-Fiving" this thing:

You don't get any "Fuck yous," from me because you're not worth the effort.

Your daughter is another story. She is going through something few people in the U.S. have experienced since the days before Salk developed the polio vaccine. I conducted a short-form narrative project on the effects measures to curb the spread had on the lives of young people. The disruption was particularly profound on those in their late teens and young adults.

My mother, who was a little girl at the time, saw disruptions and cessations of comforting social rhythms of church, school and her father's business. (He owned a small country store.) The people I interviewed who were slightly older saw plans delayed or completely scrapped. Many worked family farms to pay tuition for colleges, universities, and vocational programs only to find that many of those places abbreviated or sometimes canceled what they were offering. Secondary students at the time found themselves losing chances to do the things they'd worked for years to develop competency for such as music and sports. In some places, proms, homecoming, school plays, and game nights, were out of the question.

It is arguable that such losses are mild, that there are children going through much worse things and there are some who are handling what they are going through better than what your daughter is experiencing. What can't be denied is that this skip in social continuums, no matter the age or origin, will leave a mark. It did on my mother's generation and it will those who are experiencing similar things because of COVID-19.

No matter how grown those young people may look, no matter how much responsibility they might be shouldering -some of it much earlier than expected- they are still feeling this. They take their cues from us. It is our responsibility as adults to comfort, acknowledge, and give them the coping tools they need to get through this. I hope they have a better chance of recouping some of these things than the people who grew up in rural Tennessee and Kentucky did.

For some of them, they simply moved on. Some eventually took over the family farm or went to work. Some were moved to study medicine or history or education and English. They told the stories of what happened and who they were. As one person who did go on to distinguish themselves in American arts and letters told me: "We didn't have the sense of innocent carelessness that comes with safety. It was our story and we are still telling it. I hope this is the only time that has cause to tell such a tale."

*********************************************

I've had probably less than an hour of sleep, have eaten some Korean thing in hope that the high Scoville rating will make my joints shut up, am sad, mad and trying to find my words to talk about the pictures of friends' shoes on the White House lawn, and have a hopper full of people who need to talk to me I may have made an ass of myself and will erase this later today. I also need coffee and to watch the CC morning prayer before I do anything else. Maybe there will be cats.

-30-

 

I'm angry that things have not progressed. But I am genuinely sorry for your daughter's loss of not only her senior year of HS and the start of her college days. I know literally hundreds of others in the same spot. I'll be more conscious of the perception of what I post and will generally put a leash on stuff.

 

Refrigerated trucks already in use in one Texas county.

Texas county stores bodies in trucks as state sets one-day record for COVID-19 deaths

 

So...

The Civil War

WWI

Spanish Flu

WWII

Vietnam

COVID

It seems like about every 40 to 50 years, we deal with some major shit in America. Sorry to hear your daughter has to miss a few things, can’t she wait a year on college?, but looking at that list, COVID is far more friendly than the others.

 

I'm beginning to think these Rt numbers are a bunch of nonsense.

Among the 16 LOWEST states: Arizona (0.97), Florida (1.00) and Texas (1.01), all of which are lower than New York (1.04), the state that "figured it out."

Among the four HIGHEST states: Wyoming (1.21), Montana (1.23) and Alaska (1.30), the three states with the smallest population density.

Rt COVID-19

 

you forgot camera

 

Everyone has a right to post what they think. This has been a good discussion. The problem with it, with the whole situation, really is that there is no end in sight. People need time frames, guide posts, and such. They are how we manage ourselves and our lives.

As for young people and their school/college experiences, they're going to have to develop a different perspective on it, one similar to that suggested by the person in arts and letters near the end of Oscar Madison's post above.

I posted earlier -- many pages ago, about my accomplished nephew, who recently graduated from high school (with a two-minute walk down a sidewalk replacing the usual ceremony of pomp and circumstance at which he would have spoken as a co-valedictorian) and is now, like doctorquant's daughter, having his freshman year of college delayed, interrupted and rearranged they-are-still-trying-to-figure-out-how.

Bright, mature, generally level-headed kid that my nephew is, though, he said something that I thought was kind of profound and perceptive once when we were discussing all this: "Nobody's going to forget the class of 2020."

I, too, believe this to be true, and that whatever occurs with this group of young people is likely to be a seismic sea change in the ways schools/colleges are run and staged, and will probably lead to different set-ups and innovations that truly may last forever -- or at least until the next such period in history.

Like my nephew, the kids (and their families) are probably going to have to embrace it, make the best of it, and then, hopefully, make it better. They don't/won't have much choice, and that's the best thing for their well-being.