Post 189 - September 16, 2020

Day 189…

I am sitting across from Lincoln Center watching all of the people walking up and down and all of the traffic streaming by. Lots of Moms and Dads are out pushing kids in strollers. People on bikes are swerving around them all. They all look like New Yorkers.

This morning I had an appointment with my doctor. Not for anything specific, just a check-up. I was interested to see if he had a different take on the virus than I did. I went in expecting to be corrected on some of my assumptions, but he basically just confirmed what I’ve been thinking all along.

He’s going to have the blood he took tested for the virus, among other things, but not for the antibodies. “Why bother?” is what he said.

Since it now seems clear that they don’t last for more than a couple of months the only thing that knowing you have the COVID antibodies does, in his opinion, is give you a false sense of security.

It is interesting that there haven’t been any further reports of anybody getting it twice. The two people who did - one in China and one in Nevada - each got infected by a different strain the second time they got it. I haven’t heard of any other instances where that has happened since then, neither has my doctor.

I told him about my trip to North Dakota and our visits to Provincetown and how they were navigated, and he seemed OK with the decisions that were made. Common sense dictates most of what we should be doing these days, and both Michael and I have tried to live by that.

Before he even weighed me, I admitted that I was five pounds heavier than I was the last time I saw him. I told him about Michael’s baking.

“Let me guess… sour dough.”

Nailed it. And, full disclosure, it was six pounds.

I’ve clearly tried getting through this global pandemic by eating more, I guess I should start thinking about eating less.

He gave me this year’s flu shot and that was it. Now, there is just the always slightly anxiety-provoking wait for the test results.

Michael and I have been watching a TV series called A French Village. It’s about a village in France that gets occupied by the Nazis and what happens to them all over the years. There are at least seven seasons and I think that each season covers a different year. The first season takes place in 1940, before the US had even entered the war.

Watching it, it’s hard not to go down the rabbit hole of wondering about what might happen if the Republicans win the election again. Our President and his supporters are following Hitler’s playbook so incredibly closely that it only seems natural to take it all the way down the path to its worst possible conclusion.

A French Village is a beautiful series but there are times when we have to just watch the Great British Bake-Off instead.

Last night, while I was waiting for Michael to join me on the couch, I watched a bit of Chris Cuomo on CNN. He was yelling so much, that for a moment I thought he was one of the talking heads from the right that I listened to when I was out west in my car. While I agreed with a lot of what he was saying, he was ranting so much that I had to stop listening to him.

That’s where we are. Both sides are just yelling at each other at the top of their lungs. Both sides believe that they are completely right and that the other side is completely wrong. Chris Cuomo yelling isn’t going to change anybody on the right’s mind any more than a Fox talking head yelling is going to change mine.

The friction is amping up. You can feel it. As we draw ever closer to the election on November 3, it’s only going to get worse. And neither side is going to listen to anything.

The biggest revelation of the last few weeks is that the President not only knew, but fully understood the danger inherent in the coronavirus and that he purposefully chose to do nothing about it. He chose to downplay and dismiss the very real danger that he knew was coming our way. Tens of thousands of people’s lives could have been saved by taking action and he chose not to. He is still choosing not to, and the virus is still raging around the country.

That incredible revelation is all but getting lost in the general roar. I don’t think that it is really sinking in. And it should. But I don’t think it’s being fully taken in because it’s all just too much.

3,000 people dying during 9/11 is something we can just about process. We can mourn for them every year. There are faces and stories that can be attached to those people. They may be mostly perfect strangers to us, but once we’ve been shown into their lives, even by a single line identifying who they were and what they did, they can become real in some way.

200,000 people dead, on the other hand, aren’t real. We can’t know the stories of 200,000 people. There are just too many of them.

The amount of people who’ve died from COVID-19 is not that far off from the total number of people who died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki when we dropped the atomic bombs.

The memorials in both cities try to do everything that they can to put faces to those people. There is a room in Hiroshima where a picture of each victim comes up on a screen with a little bit about them. It takes days to work through all of them continuously. We sat in that room for a fairly long while and we saw only the tiniest fraction of the multitude who perished.

In the museum there are the clothes that some of the children who died were wearing when the blast struck. Another memorial has a little picture and a little belonging such as a toy or a pair of glasses for thousands of the victims. Both of those are something real and tangible that help make the victims actual human beings.

“Say their name” is the continual refrain that we hear around the people of color who have lost their lives to Police violence.

We can be moved by Breonna Taylor, Trayvan Martin and George Floyd because they have become people to us, with names and families and pasts. We can’t be moved in the same way by just hearing about the vast number of other people who have lost their lives in the same way. It turns into just a statistic. The bigger the number, the less we invest emotionally.

We need to know their names.

At this point with almost 200,000 American victims of the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve long since checked out.

I can mourn the people I knew. I can mourn the people I have admired. What I can’t properly mourn are all of those zeros.

It seems to me that the most basic fundamental difference between the Republican and Democratic parties is what they value most.

For the Republicans, it is the economy first - Fix the economy, you fix the people.

For the Democrats, it is people first - Fix the people, you fix the economy.

We have all the evidence that we need from other countries surrounding the globe, that the path that our President took was the wrong one. For him, it has always been all about the economy. The people be damned.

The stock market might be doing well, but is the economy as a whole?

The United States is currently carrying a National Debt of $26.70 trillion. We have the largest external debt of any country in the world. Over $7 trillion of that debt is held by foreign nations. Our Gross Domestic Product, meaning what we produced, is $21.44 trillion. Our debt is more than our income.

The President’s policy since he took office has been to boost growth using tax cuts and additional spending. Both of those things have significantly increased our debt. Continued growth under these circumstances is unsustainable.

For all of the people for whom this is a one-issue election, I would ask, is the extra couple of hundred bucks you may get back on your taxes this year, worth all of the rest of the damage that this Administration is doing?

Fair warning, all of the noise we are hearing now is only going to increase between now and November 3. As numbers start being screamed back and forth, we need to remember what, and more importantly, WHO they represent.

People. Those numbers are people

We need to say their names.

We need to do everything we can to put faces and histories on to the people who are losing their lives to the Police.

We need to do everything we can to put faces and histories on to the people who are losing their lives to COVID-19.

They aren’t just numbers - they are mothers and fathers and sisters and cousins and aunts and brothers and grandmothers and friends and uncles and grandfathers and nieces and lovers and nephews and ex’s and idols and sons and neighbors and daughters.

They are US.

Say their names. Say their names and then choose who you want to elect to lead us into the next phase of our history.

The ghosts of all of those people we’ve lost are going to be looking over our shoulders as we vote.

Say their names as you cast your ballot.