Stupid Pandemic Trash

As COVID-19 continues to spread, a lot of people have acted heroically. Healthcare personnel have cared for people with the virus at great risk to their own health. First responders have continued to do their jobs and interacted with the public, as have postal workers and other people who can’t work from home. Supermarket employees have risked their own health so we could all hoard stuff.

There have also been a lot of trashy and/or stupid people, and this is about them.

Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick last week advocated getting the country back to work despite the widespread stay-home orders and suggested older people like himself would be willing to sacrifice themselves to get the economy going again for their children and grandchildren. There was also some piece of trash who tweeted that it wasn’t worth it to shut down the economy for “2.5 percent of the population (who are) generally expensive to maintain and not productive.”

To be clear, these people are talking about sacrificing 8 million people to die alone in hospitals, gasping for air, so the stock market and GDP don’t drop too much. The thinking is these people are dead weight anyway. So who’s willing to sacrifice themselves or their elderly family members for the economy? Anyone?

I can’t see you but I assume you’re not raising your hand, and neither am I. That’s because we’re not sociopaths. Their argument is trash and deserves no further debate.

President Trump also wants everybody to go back to work right away to get the economy going again so we can sit down to a nice Easter ham in a few weeks. This ignores all advice from epidemiologists and experts about doing social distancing (which is really only in its second week) to flatten the curve of COVID-19. I’d like to get the economy going again, too—those new unemployment numbers are terrifying. But if people go back to work too early, it would be profoundly stupid. Many, many more people would die, and that would further overwhelm the hospitals, which would kill the doctors and nurses we need to save us, which would destroy our economy anyway.

Oh, but we’d all have a beautiful Easter parade before sharing a ventilator with seven other people! Wow, look at all the pastel fascinators! So pretty!

What a stupid, stupid man. It’s terrifying that Trump could pull this Easter deadline out of his ass—you could tell by the way he mentioned it that it was a casual musing that took root in his brain—and people will believe him. Look at that guy who died after ingesting a chemical to prevent COVID-19 after Trump offhandedly mentioned it. Luckily, he can’t order everyone back to work. That responsibility lies with the hopefully saner governors.

Then you have those trashbag senators who attended classified briefings on the coronavirus and then dumped their stocks in travel and other industries that would be affected. This netted them a couple million while many of their constituents in the service industry found themselves brutally and suddenly unemployed. I don’t believe for a second that they were innocently selling stocks that would benefit them. How did their brokers know what to trade? They should be investigated by the Ethics Committee and the SEC for insider trading.

Speaking of pandemic profiteering, there’s also those assholes who bought thousands of dollars of hand sanitizer and tried to gouge people for them. Now they’re crying that they’re out thousands of dollars and are facing legal trouble. Thoughts and prayers!

Then there are the idiots on spring break from Dunning-Kruger University who figured nothing bad would ever happen to them and partied on the beach and all these other places en masse. There were the dumb assholes who had a coronavirus party. You have people licking toilets to prove some kind of point. (The only point I can see is that they’ve publicly confirmed they’re the type of people who lick toilets. You sure owned us!)

And I don’t want to read any more condescending articles by young people who roll their eyes about Baby Boomers not taking social distancing seriously. I think if you study those spring break photos closely, you’ll see there weren’t too many people there born between 1946 and 1964.

But you do you, Generation Y/Z/whatever! Don’t let people who know what they’re talking about tell you what to do! USA! USA!

The World Is Still There

The day is still there.

Underneath and outside all the chaos that fills us up and drowns us, there is still the song of waking birds, the sunlight touching on the clouds like a gentle tap on the shoulder. You are still free to walk either amidst the silencing morning fog or under a painfully blue sky that shows between the budding trees. You are still free to leave your card table desk and sit out back on a balmy afternoon where nothing will touch you.

The forsythia and dandelions still appear, bringing a springtime that, even in all this, insists on keeping a schedule. There will be flowers to plant that will not know the chaos into which they will bloom.

The world is still there. Even in the ugliness and panic and stupidity and death, its beauty endures.

U.S.S. TP

A bedraggled, desperate group of survivors scanned the troubled horizon for a sign of salvation. The seas were dark and foreboding and there was no sign of the ship that would bring the afflicted the relief that they so desperately need. The last light died out on the horizon and they faced another hopeless night with no relief. It appeared they must continue to steel their insides and wait.

The world was so full of hope just weeks ago, before this pestilence started to sweep over the Earth. Most everyone seemed to have everything they needed, content in the knowledge that they could easily refill their cornucopia of plenty.

Then the panic set in. Hordes of terrified people rushing into marketplaces and bazaars, hunting down the supplies that would let them live comfortably. But the supplies disappeared as suddenly as a summer thunderstorm. All those comforting brand names—Scott, Charmin, Cottonelle—had vanished, like dead languages wiped from the Earth.

The people stared directly into the void and only inconvenience stared back.

Then the dread vigil began. When would a ship appear on the horizon to bring them back some standard of living, some creature comforts that would go to the heart of what it means to be human? To live and not just survive? They waited at the continent’s end for some sign.

Then, after three days or three weeks—in their delirium they could not say—went up the cry: “A sail! A sail!”

As dawn brightened, they could see the ship come into view and their hearts rejoiced. No longer would they be forced to live as animals. Even in their weakened, debased state, the survivors cheered.

After an eternity, the ship docked at the shoreline. The captain and his crew started unloading their bounty: Pallet after pallet of toilet paper. Brand names and generic. Single ply and two ply. Whites and pastels.

“We have a limited amount,” the captain told them. “So everyone is limited to four rolls per household until the next ship arrives.”

The crew began to distribute the rolls accordingly. But would these survivors, so tested over the last few days, listen? Would they stand in an orderly line and only take as much as they needed, so everyone could have some?

Reader, they would not. Frenzied with need, they rushed the ship, trampled the people in their way, and grabbed huge packs of toilet paper—some spouses even took a 12-pack each for their household of three people. After the riot died down, nearly half the crowd had to walk away with no toilet paper to speak of, while some had so much, it would last until the coronavirus died and the next pandemic began.

Because this wouldn’t be America if so many people didn’t have the attitude of “I got mine so eff you.”

WFH

We’ll see how this goes: Everyone in our company is working from home for the rest of March. I have been doing this every Tuesday for years so I’m used to that much. There will be positives and negatives to this experience, I’m sure.

I’m just as productive at home as I am at work. I can get done just about everything and the only drawback as far as work is that the server can be slow. We have remote meetings via Zoom, and I find those to be detached since I’m not in the room with everybody and I don’t like having my face on the screen, but the meetings are mostly fine and get the job done. I’m not on the phone that much so it’s all email anyway. I work the same hours and can “stay” later because I there’s no reason not to. The only thing going on at our house in that time is our son getting home from school, doing homework or whatever. I do still have a good work/life balance. A lot of people have trouble turning off after the work day ends but I don’t. I’m around if people need me but I don’t have the type of job where people call me at 11 p.m.

I have long been a proponent of working from home because it’s not the wave of the future, it’s the wave of the past. Many companies adopted this years ago. I don’t have to take off for repairmen or things like that, since that work can happen in the background while I’m home, and I can do laundry while I work. I know there is a need sometimes just to be in the same space as your coworkers so I don’t know if it’s practical to do all the time, but I’m up for working from home more.

I’m also much happier working from home as I’m not starting my day aggravated by drivers who absolutely cannot handle the slight amount of extra sun glare following the beginning of Daylight Saving Time. The lack of a commute will be a major blessing for me this month because I hate it I hate it I hate it. I’ll also save on gas.

There will be some drawbacks, inevitably. For one, I snack way too much at home, since the food is right there. I don’t have to wait for a coworker to leave brownies or something in the kitchen. Oddly, outside of lunch time, I never get hungry at work because there’s usually no extra food there. However, I will have more time to exercise since I will have a free hour in the morning between dropping our son off at school and starting work. Who knows if the gym will close but I can at least go for a walk.

We’ll also see how it works if Steve has to work from home. We have a nice desk setup with two monitors and everything but we only have one desk, so the other person will be working somewhere else. There will also be awkwardness with virtual meetings, competing music, etc. Plus, if they close school, the three of us will be cooped up trying to learn and/or work.

So I guess we’ll see. Nothing we can do about it.

Not Everyone's an Expert

At scary times like these, with the coronavirus “going viral” as the kids say, and the stock market in freefall, I think we might want to heed the advice of actual experts in areas like infectious disease and the economy, rather than freelancing ourselves and just doing whatever.

There are always going to be a few idiots (Mike Pence, Larry Kudlow) who pose as experts but don’t know what they’re talking about, but I think most people who have made epidemiology or economics their life’s work, such as rank and file scientists, should be heeded. So wash your hands and don’t hoard surgical masks. Leave your money where it is and ride out the market fluctuation if you’re in a position where you can.

There’s an old joke: “What do you call the person who graduates last in his class at medical school?”

“A doctor.”

I know it’s a tongue-in-cheek joke but the lowest graduate of medical school probably still knows more about medicine than you or I. Like, Ben Carson might be a dimwit in other areas but he’s probably still a better brain surgeon than I am. Besides, somebody has to graduate at the bottom. At, say, Harvard Medical School, the dumbest person in the class may have graduated with a B-plus average. Are any of us smarter than a B-plus Harvard student in that field?

Hell, I’ve been a medical editor and writer for almost 20 years. I’ve spent countless hours writing about peer-reviewed medical studies. And believe me, spending some time on PubMed certainly does not make lay people more knowledgeable than actual experts in that subject matter. Are you going to trust me, with my BA in English, to treat your lower extremity wound? What I’m saying is, if you want to scoff at actual experts, you should have more ammunition than that degree from Google University.

When people roll their eyes and go “PFFT!” at reasonable consensus statements by experts, that’s when we get healthy people hoarding surgical masks, despite warnings by the CDC and WHO, leaving fewer masks for healthcare professionals. That’s when we get the president, a man who has looked directly at a solar eclipse, calling the coronavirus “fake news” and talking out of his ass about it. That’s when you get chaos that makes the existing chaos a little worse.

Ways to Spend $500,000,000, Ranked

1. Pay off student loan debt for more than 10,000 people in the United States with average-size loans

2. Pay off medical debt for 50,000 people who owe $10,000 each

3. Feed more than 40,000 homeless veterans three meals a day for 750 days each

4. Spend $5,000 per student for 1 million kids in the most low-income school districts in America

5. Buy more than 833,000 EpiPens for people who can’t afford them

6. Forgive credit card debt for more than 60,000 people with average debt

7. Fund the Girl Scouts for five years

8. Provide college scholarships of $50,000 each to 10,000 needy students

9. Give $5,000 grants to 100,000 arts programs

10. Buy the Hope Diamond with change left over to buy Gwyneth Paltrow’s GOOP

11. Buy 76,923 wedding dresses from Vera Wang

12. Give everybody in America $1.52

…

∞ Win five delegates from American Samoa for the Democratic presidential primary