Live Free And Die

Isn't it something? We live in an age of medical and technological wonders and have the knowledge and means to solve any number of seemingly intractable problems, from climate change to plagues, but we don't, because we still can't fix stupid. We can identify stupid from the hats and the bumper stickers but we can't seem to stamp it out before it spreads.

So now we have a plethora of perfectly useful vaccines for a rampant virus but no way of cajoling enough people into protecting themselves, and the rest of us, with them. Like, we could end this thing tomorrow if we had the collective will. But even if we were able to slip the stuff into the drinking water, it wouldn't work, because so many people don't have access to clean water. The ancient Romans could manage it, but that was before billionaires were invented, and profit must be made.

You can't put vaccines in water anyway, but the only reason you're not hearing that the Deep State is planning to do it is that it seems so much more likely we'll have it sparkled into us from space. There's no end to  how dastardly a liberal--read Jewish--billionaire can be.

You didn't encounter this kind of obstinacy when the polio vaccine was developed. People were kind of simple and uncomplicated about things back then. Polio bad. Thank you Drs. Salk and Sabin. Please give me sugar cube. Now, we're sort of done with measles chickenpox diphtheria polio smallpox whooping-cough tetanus hepatitis and even the dag-gone mumps, and there are so few real things that we have to worry about we need to invent them, just to get our understimulated little chests to rise.

People used to band together to fight their foes but now we're all on our own, 330 million armies of one. Some people would never get a vaccine on principle, that principle being freedom, or some toddler's version of it. Others would rather wait and see how it turns out. "Wait and see" is not a reasonable plan from a public health standpoint when time is of the essence with a still-rampaging mutating microbe, but many people are suspicious. Look how quickly Trump got the vaccines developed, they say. Wasn't he wonderful? On the other hand, it was way too quick to trust. Let's see how many people drop dead from the vaccine first! We can stack those bodies up here, and the COVID Hoax bodies over there, and see which pile looks scariest. That's science, right there. That's just using the old bean.

One fellow who got COVID and has no intention of getting the vaccine explained it this way: "I had a fever for a couple days. I don't think it's the bogeyman they made it out to be."

A half million others were unavailable for comment.

Black people, as a demographic, have a well-founded historical distrust of the medical establishment but seem to be coming around to the advisability of vaccination. Republicans have a distrust of the truth. And they don't trust government ever to do the right thing. Which, considering the last four years, is almost reasonable.

Can't fix stupid. You can fix ugly, but it takes a face mask. So. Back where we started.

Drawing The Line

Big line at the bank today. I wasn't expecting a line because nobody goes into an actual bank anymore, but it was a Friday and I guess the Pay Day thing still applies.

That's how banking used to be. You got paid on Friday and you spent your lunch half-hour standing in line at the bank. That's how you could get cash money which you could exchange for beer. It didn't get excreted from a pore on the outside wall and it sure as hell didn't travel through space and reassemble in money molecules inside your account, from which you could withdraw it on your phone

Of course, nobody needs cash anymore. The grocery store is happy to dispense cash with your cauliflower, but mostly you don't need it. You can pay for absolutely anything absolutely any old way that doesn't involve cash. I don't know what street beggars are doing now, if they don't take cards.

I know you can take photos of your checks with your phone and shlorp them into your account from the comfort of your beanbag chair, or even at a stoplight, but I don't know how it's done and doubt my phone would cooperate. So I walk to the bank and hand my checks to the teller once a month or so. There's never a time a three-mile stroll isn't in order, and I don't have anything else I need to do. It's not like there's a line.

Until today. And the line appeared to have something to do with it being Friday and more to do with the dearth of tellers and the fact that one gentleman occupied one teller for the entire time I was there (that's a lot of mysterious banking), and the ATM outside was broken. The line was out the door because we were all spaced out, man.

The fellow in line in front of me did not recommend himself to me as an attractive font of conversation. He stabbed irritably at his phone and groused about stuff and eventually made it to the vestibule, from which he beckoned me--"They're letting two people in the vestibule"--and so in the name of visible progress I entered the vestibule, a small enclosed space, and the man continued to stab at his phone and grouse, with his face mask stationed under his bulbous nose, and I excused myself back outside, causing a cascade of back-stepping in the outdoor line.

By the time I graduated to all-the-way-indoors and stood on my assigned painted spot, the man ahead of me, Nose-Boy, got to a teller who wanted to know how he was today, or so she said, and he growled "Well, I've been standing in line for forty minutes," which was demonstrably not true unless he was there for twenty minutes before I showed up, which he was not. And he spluttered all of this with his face mask parked under his nose.

I know the tellers, who have to spend all day in that building with everybody's dangling or aerosolized secretions, would have loved to ask him to pull up his face mask. But people get tired of having to scold other grownups. And it rarely works out. This fellow wouldn't have taken it well. He was already put out by everything. The tellers have to make a calculation: risk severe unpleasantness accompanied by more spewing, or count on protection from the high ceilings and the Plexiglass? I didn't even have to work there all day and I didn't tell the man I was leaving the vestibule because his stupid nose was hanging out. I'd do the same thing as the tellers did.

Nothing. God Bless America.

Nothing Left To Lose

"You young people," our beloved English teacher once scolded us, "you've cleaned up all my beautiful dirty words!"

It was true. There wasn't a part of speech we didn't drop an F-bomb in, and the word didn't hold a sting anymore. We'd rendered it harmless. Meaningless.

Something like that has happened to another F-word, too. And Freedom was a pretty good idea, worth fighting for. Our founding fathers were on the right track: freedom of speech. Freedom of religion. Freedom to peaceably assemble. All of these freedoms are rightfully enshrined in our documents. Blood was spilled for them. They represented humanity at its finest.

It was a worthy aspiration, but in a new land with so much room in it for rugged individuals to push into, the concept of freedom was destined to lose its shine. Freedom began to be equated with acquisition. Unearned ownership. Plunder. In a country unconstrained by boundaries or kings, we all became little kings. Survival still took pluck and initiative, but freedom for some meant slavery for others. Or genocide. We got some things right, and still felt free to massacre.

We didn't let freedom ring. We let it metastasize.

We let ourselves imagine that a family that runs domestic cattle over untold acreages is being deprived of liberty if we insist they account for the damage accrued to the rest of us: loss of habitat, of water, of wildlife. We let ourselves imagine our freedoms should drive other people's freedom underground: the customer unserved. The medically fragile left to die for our freedom to infectiously assemble.

It's beyond juvenile. "It's a free country!" That's what kids my age used to say whenever someone told them it was bedtime, or scolded them for sass. They didn't know what it meant to be free but they didn't care to be told what to do. At least, when I was being brought up, that retort got the attention it deserved. None.

It would all work out if there were fewer of us. Multitudes fewer. But we're densely populated all over the planet, and everything we do affects everyone else. There must be rules. Freedom cannot be unrestricted, or it results in loss of freedom. If Americans during a quarantine think their freedom is being threatened, they have already been compromised by a wealthy class that has paid dues to ensure we do not notice that they've already taken away our freedom. They've taken away our ability to organize by telling us unions deny us our "freedom to work"--to work for scraps, for no security, for no benefits. We have the freedom to accept what little they are willing to give us. Tell an American her freedoms are being stolen, and you can steal everything she has. You can leave her desperate after one month without a paycheck, and she won't even suspect there's something wrong with a system that produces so much wealth for so few while leaving so many in poverty. You can convince her someone even poorer than she is the real thief.

Get the people all riled up for some shitty little freedoms like not wearing a mask or not baking a cake, and send them to the polls, and you can pick their pockets clean.

Will we stand for that? Or will we stand together, and thrive?