Thursday, December 31, 2020
2020 hindsight
As this very unusual year draws to an end, I thought it would be a good idea to look back at the last 12 months and see what, if anything, we have learned.
The sad truth is I don’t think we’ve learned a thing.
I still hear people who think that the Coronavirus is no worse than the seasonal flu despite the fact that as of this writing, 334,029 people in the United States have died of it since Jan 21, 2020. In contrast, only 22,000 people died of the normal flu in 2019-2020 flu season. .
Yet despite all the evidence around them -- like over-flowing hospitals and a healthcare system on the brink of collapse -- I still see people asserting their “rights” not to wear masks or protesting government restrictions limiting large gatherings. To make matters worse, unscrupulous politicians are using this crisis not bring the country together, but to separate us into small tribes as if this were some sort of game.
This has left me feeling frustrated on a number of levels and makes me feel like the year 2020 is going to be the year that began the decline and fall of one of the greatest countries on Earth.
The United States was built on all of us being one, unified people. It’s right there in the pledge of allegiance we all recited as children: “one nation under G-d, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” Yet politicians seem bound and determined to divide us into small groups: red and blue, Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative, snowflake or fascist.
For G-d’s sake, didn’t we fight a war over this 150 years ago? Does no one remember that famous Lincoln quote: "A house divided against itself cannot stand."?
The United States didn’t expand across an entire continent, help turn the tide in the world’s first mechanized war, survive a great depression, defeat fascist regimes bent on world domination and win a cold war, by turning against each other and fighting among ourselves.
On the contrary, we put on our big-boy pants, put aside our differences, and came together to fight whatever the current threat was. But today there seems no interest in this. All people seem to be interested in today is their own good. Screw the other guy, as long as they get what’s good for them, they don’t care what happens to anyone else.
This has never become more clear to me than the people who still refuse to mask up. “It violates MY rights,” they say. “I shouldn’t be forced to wear a mask.”
And they are right. They do have a right NOT to wear that mask. But to paraphrase the late, great StanLee, “With our great First Amendment rights, comes great responsibility” and while some people are all about defending those rights, they forget about their responsibilities to their fellow citizens that comes with them.
Look, our rights do NOT let us do anything we want. The U.S. Constitution guarantees us to the right of free speech, but you can be damn sure that if I yell “Fire!” in a crowded theater (remember them?) that you’d be arrested for causing a stampede if not a few deaths.
Likewise, there is no law that says you have to wear any clothing if you don’t want to. But you still can’t go out in public naked, even if you find clothing gives you a rash or prevents your skin from breathing. You’d be arrested for public indecency. And what about my right to go around shirtless with nothing on my feet? I should be able to walk into any restaurant and get something to eat, right? So where is all the outrage over those “No shirts, no shoes, no service signs” I see posted on almost every eatery’s door?
Then, on top of all this disregard for our fellow citizens, we’ve suddenly turned our collective backs on another thing that allowed this country to excel: our reverence for science and the opinion of experts.
Our history is chockful full scientists, doctors and engineers whose inventions and discoveries helped change the world: Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Morse, Eli Whitney, George Washington Carver, Thomas Edison, George Eastman, Walter Reed, Philo Farnsworth, Robert Goddard, Benjamin Spock, Jonas Salk. Then there are others like Albert Einstein and Nikola Tesla who came to this country and became citizens because of the value our country placed on science.
But I’m afraid that wouldn’t happen today. If Einstein and Tesla were thinking of about coming to our country now, they’d probably be turned off by self-proclaimed, armchair experts who think that because they saw something on Facebook or spent 10 minutes Googling something, that they suddenly know more about science and engineering than they do.
It’s sad because I always thought that we were better than this. I always believed each new year would bring us one step closer to the shiny utopian future portrayed in “Star Trek” and not toward the bleakness of the Empire’s rule in the “Star Wars” universe.
But if 2020 has taught me anything, it’s that maybe it’s time to retire those rose-colored glasses and optimistic attitude I’ve always viewed the future with and start looking at it with a more skeptical eye.
I hope 2021 will change this attitude, but at the moment, I’m not counting on it.
Sunday, May 31, 2020
A New Post-Covid Normal? I think not.
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| Like now, the wearing of masks during the Spanish Flu was strongly encouraged, but it didn't become the "new normal" after that pandemic past. |
As the country moves to reopen after two months of being locked down, I’ve been hearing a lot of talk about what the “New Normal” will be like after the Coronavirus pandemic passes.
I’ve heard people say that the handshake and shopping mall will go the way of the horse and buggy, face masks, the constant wiping down of surfaces and handwashing will be de rigueur, people will work from home instead of commuting to crowded offices and virtual meetings will replace the in-person kind.
I’ve even herd it suggested that people will be reluctant to gather in large groups anymore.
All this makes me want to role my eyes and ask these folks what box of Cracker Jacks they got their degrees from, because all these pontifications just show how woefully ignorant they are about both human nature and our own history.
To me, these folks are no better than the “Internet Experts” I wrote about last month, who, after five minutes of googling something, suddenly think they know more about any given subject than someone who has devoted his or her career to studying that subject.
Apparently these folks haven’t been paying attention to the newscasts they’ve been on, because I don’t know how else they could have missed all the stories about anti-lockdown protests. They may have started in Michigan and Pennsylvania in April, but they have now spread around the world to places like London, Germany and even Australia.
This just goes to show that we humans are creatures of habit and want to always return to doing something familiar no matter what.
Sure, on the face of it, these pundits’ post-Covid predictions make sense. Let’s face it, handshakes aren’t exactly the most sanitary of customs and crowding together in confined areas like theaters, malls, and sport stadiums or packing ourselves like sardines into airplanes and subway cars are the perfect mediums to spread a contagion. Logically if we wanted to avoid another pandemic – whether it’s the predicted second wave of Coronavirus – or some new and more devastating disease, we should stop doing these things right away.
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This clip from the Jan. 21 1919 edition of the Long Beach
Daily Telegram shows that even during the Spanish Flu
pandemic, that people were protesting wearing masks.
(Photo courtesy of Newspapers.com)
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To paraphrase my favorite observer of human nature, “Star Trek’s” Mr. Spock, we humans aren’t logical. We are governed by our emotions and as recent political discourse in this country shows, we are no longer swayed by rational, logical arguments. We now appear only to respond to appeals to baser instincts.
The type of changes suggested by these “new-normallers” are a radical departure from our pre-Covid world and radical changes seldom result from one, large, single event. Those type of societal changes develop slowly over a course of years. And when there is a sudden shock to the status quo, any changes that do occur are often short-lived.
Don’t believe me?
Then let’s take a look at recent history.
The 911 attacks back in 2001 resulted in a dramatic re-evaluation of transportation security. In the weeks and months that followed, strict new security measures were put in place to prevent terrorists from boarding airplanes or sneaking weapons aboard them. Anyone travelling by air was closely scrutinized with few if any exceptions.
However, as time has gone on without any new attacks, those rules have gradually become more and more relaxed.
Sure, things haven’t returned to 1990s-levels of security, but now frequent flyers can sign up for a program that lets them bypass most of this enhanced security and in someplaces you don’t even have to take off your shoes anymore.
I know in part some of this is due to better technology like full-body scanners and bomb-sniffing baggage checking machines, but I feel like the real reason the restrictions were relaxed was because of the inconvenience factor. Flyers started to complain about how the delays caused by the new security measures were affecting their routines and the airlines, anxious to return to business as normal, were more than happy to accommodate them and pressure the government to relax security.
Still need convincing?
Let’s stay with our airline security example bit longer as we travel a further back in time to the early 1970s.
During that time there was a spike in "skyjackings" and for the first time ever, the government mandated that all baggage needed to be checked and people had to pass through metal detectors before boarding a flight. They also started to place sky marshals on what seemed like every single flight to deter would-be highjackers.
Even as a kid, I remember hearing how seriously everyone was taking these new security measures and how strict they were going to be. We were promised that they would put an end to highjackings once and for all.
And for a while it did.
By the late ’70s and early ’80s, skyjackings were a dim memory. The security had worked.
Then we got complacent. The extra security seemed unneeded, the cost of placing sky marshals on so many flights became unmanageable and while there were still baggage checks and x-rays at the airport, they were treated more like a formality than an actual security check.
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After the Spanish Flu, people once again packed together in New York City unbothered
by their close proximity as this photo from 1921 shows. The crowd had gathered
outside the New York Times building to follow the progress of the Jack Dempsey– Georges Carpentier fight in 1921. (Photo courtesy of The New York Times Photo Archive) |
This perfectly illustrates my point.
As memory of a crisis fades – and they all do—even the most vigilant among us revert back to doing things the way we’ve always done them. It is just human nature.
Changing the way a society operates is a hard, slow and incremental process. Even the smartphone revolution took almost a decade to change how we live our day-to-day lives. It only seems like it happened overnight. But in reality, it took that long for the marketing departments of Apple (iPhone), Research in Motion (Blackberry) and Motorola (Android phones) to convince us that we all needed to carry one of their devices. Even the notoriously anti-cell phone, Mrs. BlueScream grudgingly caved in and got one three years ago so she could function in the world.
Now, before you say attitudes towards airline security and smart phones are completely different from pandemics, let me draw your attention back to the Spanish Flu outbreak of 1918-19, to which our current situation has rightfully been compared.
A tad over 100 years ago, our nation was confronted with the same issues we are today. A mysterious new virus was sweeping through the country killing thousands and all the government could do to control the infection rate was to impose isolation and quarantine on the public.
Yes, virology was in its infancy and “wonder drugs” like penicillin were still a decade away, but we still understood the basic science behind it. We knew how the diseases like the flu spread. And yet by 1920-21, the world had returned to normal and people were back to gathering in large numbers in cities, went back to shopping, went back out to restaurants and gathering with friends and family just as they’d done before the pandemic.
It is a trend that continued straight from the 1920s right up to when the lockdowns began little over two months ago.
So why does anyone really expect anything to be different this time around?
As I said in my recent blog about history repeating itself, the past is indeed prologue and to expect a different outcome this time around not only defies logic, but shows an utter disregard and knowledge of our own history.