Think back to the last time you caught a news item about some poor sot on the other side of the world getting eaten by a crocodile. The last one I saw, and I’m not making this up, orbited around a guy who was wading about in brackish water inexplicably searching for worms. Some gosh-awful-huge saltwater crocodile zipped in, and our worm-hunting hero was lizard poop. I cringed a bit when I read that, but returned to my Frosted Flakes in fairly short order. We don’t have crocodiles here, so truth be known I don’t much care.
What Do Crocodiles Have to Do With COVID-19?
Now imagine if the crocodiles were migrating. Great big bleeding batches of them are spreading across the globe gobbling up folks with wanton abandon. With each passing day they get a wee bit closer. The sordid tales of reptilian death and mayhem are certainly compelling, but crocodiles are still not any great menace in my sleepy little Southern town.
Now picture that we have actually seen a few crocodiles, but they’re really not as big or as bad as we had expected. Folks have grown weary of all this ethereal crocodile talk and are ready to get back to their lives. Perhaps crocodiles aren’t even real. If they are, maybe they’re not nearly as nasty as everybody makes them out to be. Maybe this whole crocodilian tale was concocted by some secret government cabal inexplicably intent upon ruining our lives.
Here’s the real deal, my friends. Belief is but a biased reflection of reality, not its author. We can certainly deny the existence of crocodiles. However, when one of them comes slithering up your cul-de-sac, whatever it was you believed makes absolutely no difference.
Dispatches From the Front
Our world is awash to its gunwales in horrible new statistics. How many of us recognized such terms as Case Fatality Rate or R-nought three months ago? The numbers coming out of New York City, however, are undeniably breathtaking.
NYC has a population of about 8.4 million people. As of May 8, 2020, one in every 426 New Yorkers had been killed by COVID-19. In folks older than 75 that number becomes one in 60. Yes, the flu is bad and cigarettes kill 480,000 Americans a year. However, this beast killed between 15 and 20,000 New Yorkers in about 60 days.
I have a friend who lives in downtown New York. He is gobsmacked that folks are wandering about without masks and hell-bent to fill sports stadiums; that’s because he now lives among the crocodiles.
COVID Conspiracies
I don’t put much credence in government conspiracy theories; that’s because I used to work for the government. I’ve read all about how government operatives in black helicopters read our emails and poison our vaccines with mind control chemicals. Whatever. I know that there are no spooky black government helicopters.
There are no black helicopters because if there were, then some 19-year-old would maintain them, and that kid would have a girlfriend. In a weak moment he would tell her about his job, and she would post it on the Internet. Government is too bloated, inefficient, self-serving, and stupid to sustain a proper conspiracy. That includes everybody else’s governments as well. The Chinese didn’t engineer SARS-CoV-2 to destabilize the Western democracies. In a fit of simple lyrical incompetence they might have left the lab door ajar and inadvertently let it scurry out, but I can’t see anybody planning this thing.
Don’t Drink the Snake Oil
“Plandemic” alleges that Dr. Fauci sidelined the real treatments because he stands to make bank off of a vaccine. In the Information Age it seems to me nobody could actually get away with that. Drink enough water and your stomach acid will kill the virus. Inhaling hot air from a hair dryer will deactivate the virus before it gets to your lungs. Colloidal silver, essential oils, vitamins, or special teas will render you immune. The 5G cellular network is spreading coronavirus (lunatics in the UK have burned down 77 cell towers over that one thus far). Today everybody with a keyboard gets a voice. However, a lot of folks out there either have weird agendas or are simply crazy.
Don’t trust people because they have letters after their names. Go research it yourself and draw your own conclusions. Also, think things through before doing something that cannot be undone. Like congregating together someplace. I’ve seen these crocodiles, and I don’t know if I’ll ever enter a public place again without a mask.
Terror Fatigue
We’re all suffering from terror fatigue. Some 88,000 Americans are dead, and we’ve wallowed in it for more than two months now. Had we not locked ourselves indoors that number would have undoubtedly been astronomically higher.
The current crisis has brought out the worst in some. In the guise of promoting the public good some politicians have shown themselves to be fairly competent aspiring dictators. I find that frankly terrifying. It seems there was not the grand philosophical gulf between the USA and places like North Korea and Venezuela as perhaps we had previously believed. The U.S. Constitution was a great and sacrosanct institution right up until it seemed inconvenient or dangerous. Then we were ready to retire it to the dustbin. I have friends who died for that document. We’ve got to do better than this.
We’re crawling out of our holes now. For what it’s worth I think it is time we did that. However, to my fellow Americans, please stop shouting at each other. The crocodiles are the bad guys, not our countrymen. To those in government, stop scoring political points off the backs of dead Americans; that’s morally reprehensible. This is a deadly disease, not a Presidential campaign. Show some respect. The blame casting can wait.
Little is safer now. The difference is that now we have beds and we have a plan. What say we try getting through the zombie apocalypse without killing each other.
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