What should we be learning from Covid-19?

 What am I learning from Covid-19? I never bought into the array of conspiracy theories that circulated freely. I never put much credence in pop-treatments from bleach to hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin. Early on I suspected that had we done what the CDC and WHO recommended in January 2020 we would have been past the pandemic long ago. I now see that was an illusory hope, though I am still sure hundreds of thousands of deaths and debilitating illnesses would have been avoided. With the parade of variants, now up to omicron in the Greek alphabet, I think what we should all be learning is the finite limitations of human knowledge. No, I don't believe we were lied to by science or CDC, only that we may have been overconfident in our human ability to understand and address everything. We are always learning, so should expect what we once thought we knew needs to be corrected and updated. I do believe that the response to Covid-19 should never have been politicized but treated as a significant public health issue, so I am suspicious that politicians posing as scientists or critics of scientists either lied to us or were themselves delusional.

Just an aside about responding to skipping the Greek letter Xi in naming variants. I have no insight into the rationale for that (or skipping Nu), but I seriously doubt it had anything to do with being controlled by or not wanting to offend China. In my days of doing educational research, I often used the statistical procedures known as chi-squared. Chi (pronounced ki) is the Greek letter that looks a lot like the English X (thus Merry Xmas since chi is the first letter in the Greek for Christ). In the chi-squared process, chi was the variable that indicated is a deviation from the expected response was statistically significant.

So, for any of you who have endured to the end of my ramblings, my conclusion is that we all should be learning humility from our global, human experience with Covid-19.

Irresistible Force or Immovable Object?

“A foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell—and great was its fall!”

Jesus - Matthew 7:26-27

I do not intend to take anything away from Joe Biden and the Democrats, nor to criticize them. However, regardless of what you think of Donald Trump and the movement identified with him, they are on center stage in the US right now. Nor am I interested in any sort of political advocacy. Rather, I want to explore my ponderings about human propensities and vulnerabilities. Historical dynamics are certainly in play. Insights from literature, such as in MacBeth and Richard III, highlight the human universality of our present day that extend well beyond politics.

Since the 2020 election, Donald Trump has certainly consolidated his power and control in the Republican Party. The people in the Trump movement are unswervingly loyal and vocal in their support. Recent changes in electoral policies and practices in several states clearly favor those who will receive Trump support in the 2022 midterm elections and make a successful run for the Presidency by Donald Trump in 2024 seem plausible. 

On the other side of this is the gathering storm of impending crises for Donald Trump and the people and organizations surrounding him. The legal and political efforts to get his tax returns made public still continue. Several legal actions pending against a variety of Trump enterprises and organizations. The rejection of the results of the 2020 election is not relenting. The January 6 storming of the US Capital has brought both criminal and civil proceedings against those who participated. The conflict between Trump and his people with the Congressional committee investigating January 6 keeps these tensions in public view.

I sense we are witnessing something of a collision of the irresistible force and the immovable object. I tend to see Trump et al as the immovable object and the gathering storm as the irresistible force. Others may find reversing that to be more meaningful. Or perhaps it is like a cyclotron accelerating particles to crash them into a target of very heavy atoms splitting their nuclei and releasing a tremendous burst of energy. Or maybe two gargantuan black holes colliding in the deep reaches of space soaking up everything in proximity to their gravity.

I am neither making a prediction nor preferring an outcome for what seems it could define the course of our society for generations to come. Will the Trump movement collapse on itself like colliding cultural black holes? Will it release a burst of energy that reinvents the US and sends it in unanticipated directions? Will there be long term immobility and division as the forces in play strive against each other with neither making any headway? I am not looking for definitive answers to resolve these and a myriad of related questions. Rather I am inviting other thoughtful people to enter into serious discernment of our times.

Your Political Presuppositions May be Dangerous to Your Health

My tongue in cheek speculation for which there is no evidence is that Covid-19 vaccine resistance may be a liberal conspiracy for suppression of Republican voters, extrapolated from these lines from the New York Times (that voice of loser liberals), November 8, 2021.

[The Covid-19 vaccines] proved so powerful, and the partisan attitudes toward them so different, that a gap in Covid’s death toll quickly emerged.

In October, 25 out of every 100,000 residents of heavily Trump counties died from Covid, more than three times higher than the rate in heavily Biden counties (7.8 per 100,000).

The vaccines are remarkably effective at preventing severe Covid, and almost 40 percent of Republican adults remain unvaccinated, compared with about 10 percent of Democratic adults.