A Nation Risk Averse - Scared, Cowering, and Compliant

George Rebane

In the middle of the 20^th century we lived in a world filled with ‘unconquered’ infectious diseases that were both life threatening and life limiting.  Everything from measles to polio lurked in places unknown.  And, of course, we had the rates of mortality and morbidity to show for it.  Nevertheless, life went on in full recognition of the hidden dangers laying in wait.  None of us thought of shutting down the country and cowering in our homes until someone somewhere in authority would make the dangers go away.

The 1918 Spanish flu pandemic killed 50M worldwide and somewhere well above half million Americans died of the disease.  But life not only went on, it thrived in the years after WW1 with the country’s economy growing while people were still coming down with the virus and other maladies.  Little to no mention of the disease made the news nor required special government dispensations affecting the entire population.  The flu was there, it would stay for a while, and then it would go away – meanwhile try not to get sick.

The same happened later in the century when we weathered the ‘Asian flu’ in 1957 – over 110,000 deaths in the US and 1M worldwide.  And then there came the ‘Hong Kong flu’, another Asian flu in 1968 – 100,000 deaths in the US and 1.1M worldwide.  From the NIH we learn that “within the past one hundred years, four pandemics have resulted from the emergence of a novel influenza strain for which humans possessed little or no immunity: the H1N1 Spanish flu (1918), the H2N2 Asian flu (1957), the H3N2 Hong Kong flu (1968), and the H1N1 swine flu (2009).”  They summarize these pandemics in the following table.

And then there were others like the avian or ‘bird flu’ which killed 70,000 Americans; and even more - it’s all very confusing.  But the bottom line is that people didn’t lose jobs, companies didn’t go out of business, the fed and state governments didn’t go autocratic, no one panicked, life went on.

Those of us who lived through the last 70+ years saw how things started changing around 1970 in our public spheres – schools, churches, entertainment media, news media, non-profits, government agencies, … .  In the period since, my generation and I have noted the rapid decline of Americans’ ability to recognize and handle life’s risks as individuals.  As our public schools degraded and spread a blanket of dumbth across the land, we were taught that we had a bevy of newly discovered ‘rights’ to live a nurtured life in which the risks from suffering economically, healthwise, psychologically, and intellectually were to be removed/prohibited by various government bureaus, agencies, and sundry other institutions that sprang into being and then metastasized themselves or their proxies into our local schools, businesses, non-profits, local governments, … .  On our part, all we had to do was to become compliant to the manufactured mores and rules of the newly defined classes into which we found ourselves placed.

And during the course of these years we were also taught to look upon those who did not conform to the new world of political correctness as being somehow socially errant and detrimental to the common good.  We started publicly criticizing each other’s non-group behaviors that didn’t fit the prescribed templates.  These criticisms quickly morphed into accepted civic proscriptions that found their way into laws and regulations which were more and more enforced in our workplaces and other organizations we belonged to that defined our communities.

The current coronavirus (C19) pandemic has brought all this social ‘progress’ into a glaring focus.  When told of the latest virus from China, we immediately demanded to be insulated from it, and looked to our national political leaders to secure us from its potential ravages.  We ‘instinctively’ looked to the federal government as the responsible agency for keeping us safe.  Our socialist party saw the C19 pandemic as an opportunity to not only enhance its chances in the upcoming election, but also to push through its long-rejected palliative social programs.  And in the process to implement a whole new layer of public expectations and compliance.  The ultimate government response was to shut down an historically thriving economy and immediately go into debt for additional trillions of dollars with which to paper over the impacts of their unreasonable overreaction.

(South Korea and Sweden did not shut down their economies.  They were not better prepared for C19 than other developed nations.  Yet they have fared no worse than the US and the other nations that have shuttered their economies and sheltered in place.)

Today we are told that it is the federal government that must be all-seeing and prepared for all emergencies, no matter how unknown, rare, exotic, or unaffordable they would be to prevent.  And if the federal government fails to fully perform in such predictions, prescriptions, and prophylactics, then the cause of and solution to such a shortcoming is obvious.  It was clearly the result of greedy capitalism, the economic order that puts profits before people, has promoted corrupt politicians into the highest levels of government, who are then supported by the deplorables in the land by nature ignorant and evil.  And the solution is equally clear, government must always be enlarged and enabled to provide for and participate in ever more facets of people’s private lives – guiding their attitudes, values, mores, private and public endeavors, …, in short, all that is required to convert individual minds into the politically dominant uniformly ubiquitous hive mind.

Those who resist will be detected, identified, and reported to the authorities even by newly compliant cadres of model citizens and neighbors.  An example of such social progress is evident in the 23apr20 edition of our local Union that published a letter from a Ms Christine Brooks, one of the model citizens already living among us.

What’s with the pickleball outlaws?  People are supposed to be at home isolating and staying away from others to lower this virus curve. Yet the pickleball people are still allowed to congregate at the outdoor courts at the South Yuba Club on Berryhill Drive in Grass Valley?

While walking my dog, I saw about 12 to 14 people out on the court. I’ve seen them three days now. Why are the police allowing this? We should all be able to get together if these morons are allowed.  I’m disgusted with selfish people and disgusted with the police. Rope off the area.

Pickleball outlaws? yea verily!

And our local leaders (save a few like Nevada City Mayor Reinette Senum and State Senator Brian Dahle) are equally and unquestioningly compliant to higher authority without a murmur of resistance or even doubt in the sanity and common sense absent from the newly minted laws and regulations, no matter how blatantly unconstitutional, that rain down from Sacramento.  At the grassroots level we used to be a people comprised of independent individuals who examined every government-issued stricture with a gimlet eye, and then decided whether and how we would comply, complain, or counter.  Not anymore.

Comments

[The Estonian Fox]

George, good article.

It should be obvious that our "in-the-know" medical and political professionals didn't know shi*t about how to handle this problem. All of the planning meetings held since 2003 (after SARS-1) were just for show. They never made any monetary vs health trade-offs, had no idea of the consequences and unknowns about a ‘new’ disease. They don't know how to find out the true infection and mortality rates. Don’t even know when the first infection arrived in the U.S. No one bothered to check the actions by those uninformed, computer-illiterate individuals and governments after the Spanish flu in 1918. Those 100-years-ago people were just stupid.

Will we throw out those responsible for being incompetent? Very funny. If we do, who would be given credit for creating $3+T dollars out of thin air? Everybody gets free money – universities, big & small businesses, us (young & old), hospitals, maybe states. Where do we all go from here? Even Dr. Pangloss has turned pessimistic. Pickleball anyone?

[L]

What the hell is pickleball?

[Don Bessee]

Boy am i glad we did our sams big shopping 2 days before the lock down and picked up a 4 back of Clorox wipes. My wife puts one in each bathroom and the kitchen normally and we had only run out in 1 bath room so we will do fine until then.--

Household cleaning products like Lysol and Clorox wipes won't be fully back in stock until July or August, supply-chain experts say

https://www.yahoo.com/news/household-cleaning-products-lysol-clorox-193305515.html

;-)

[George Rebane]

L 602pm - https://www.usapa.org/what-is-pickleball/

[L]

Thanks George, so wiffleball with score kept- looks like real fun, outdoor table tennis. Only in America! TM

[scenes]

"Household cleaning products like Lysol and Clorox wipes won't be fully back in stock until July or August, supply-chain experts say"

Since a large part of the efficacy is leaving the surface wet, my guess is that they do less good for most people than you might think.

It's funny how some things ran dry so quickly in our JIT world. Mea culpa if the following are obvious.

Pro tip for cleaning products: Buy a bottle of those glass rinsing disinfectants that they use in bars. One tablet to a gallon of water, usually 150 pills per bottle, stick in a spray dispenser.

Pro tip for paper products: Assuming they're still hard to find, keep an eye out for commercial paper towels and toilet paper. They're often in weird form factors that people don't think of (center pull, tiny spindles, stacking squares).

Pro tip for flour: Wheatberries ground up. Most people don't have a grain mill, use a blender.

Pro tip for yeast: Use the kind that is made for wine or champagne. Works fine. Make a sourdough from scratch, it's magic.

[Bill Tozer]

COURAGE? IT’S IN SHORT SUPPLY

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2020/04/courage-its-in-short-supply.php