There is that story we all know and believe that is you put a frog in pot of cool water and slowly turn up the heat, it will not notice the change in temperature and die. Well, it is scientifically not true, but I am banking that part of you still wants to believe it is.
Right now, there is an amount of insanity going on that is beyond comprehension. Perhaps simple butler points will suffice for an introduction:
1) The federal government is stating that it will have a vaccine ready to go and start being administered on November 1, 2020, two days before the presidential election. That is under two months from now.
2) Colleges have been sending students back to school with the provision that they have the students keep STRICT pandemic hygiene rules in order. Each day, there are reports of hundreds of college students getting the virus and there seems to be no end in sight.
3) Schools with grades 1-12 are starting to open up now. Teachers have been given paper or cloth masks for themselves (nothing industrial grade in the slightest), are told to keep the windows open at all times to help with circulation, and will be fired if they do not return to school to teach. (Note that this information is from a teacher I know in New Jersey.)
3.5) Bars, restaurants, and gyms will be open in a few days. While all with have a theoretical reduced capacity, diners will not be wearing masks. In movie theaters, you will be asked to wear a mask when you are not eating.
4) A Christian wedding in Maine, where no one wore masks or distanced themselves, has caused a super-spread of the virus in a town that previously had no cases. The pastor who did the wedding flew to and from the wedding in his private plane. He returned to his parish and, in the course of a week has infected everything from nursing homes to the prison in the town. As of this writing, he is stating that he will never wear a mask and shall continue to hold services where people take no precautions at all in church,
5) The federal government has stated at some point this week that it is choosing to combat the virus via "heard immunity", meaning that they wish to have the virus spread as it will so that the bulk of the populous will get infected, the majority becoming immune, and the others die.
6) The current president of the United States has heard many rallies where masses of people have gathered to support him. Neither he, nor 99% of the people pushed together at these events, wore masks.
7) Wearing a mask has become a political statement. Not wearing one means you agree with the president, wearing one means you are an enemy to them. Many many fights have broken out between people in stores and other places over mask wearing.
8) There are continual protests against the police deaths of African-American men and women all over the country. At night, these peaceful protests turn violent via looters and radical militia-groups who come in with guns saying they are going to protect the people of the city and the businesses. A seventeen year old male shot and killed two people in such a situation. He walked around with a semi-automatic assault rifle in front of police who let him walk by, all the while people were screaming that he had just shot two people moments before. Also note that the police offered him water and food earlier in the evening and supposed his presence. Finally, as of this writing, he has received over half a million dollars in money for his legal defense via strangers online.
9) For the first time in the history of the United States, the upcoming election is in jeopardy and its outcome will most likely be challenged in ways ranging from legal battles to open gun conflict in certain areas.
I could go on for pages with all this, but you get the idea of what is happening. And this was the past few days. There is more, MUCH MORE, than what I am stating here, but I just want to give you a taste of what every single day is like, with all of us knowing that things are going to get worse and worse for the rest of the year. Even if, at best, the problems with the government get resolved peacefully, the virus will still be out there in 2021.
Is it any wonder why so many of us are having a hard time just existing? The blessing of mass and immediate communication has bloomed its shadow side in many ways during all this. If this were happening a hundred years ago, we would have newspapers and perhaps a radio to tell us what is going on. Now, we are drowning in a pool of news every day. And even if, EVEN IF, you do not watch any news and are going past all of this in your own world, your old life is gone, whether you like it or not.
We have been sitting I this pool for decades now, with the advent of 24 hour news and then the internet. For the most part, the temperature was steady and we were fine. But since the pandemic, that temperature has been slowly been heating up to the point where all of us can see that we will be at boiling point soon and that we have no control over it. Camus states that we must rebel if we are to be fully human. But that is the problem with this situation, how do we rebel?
The simple answer is that we rebel against our fate by doing all that we should to stop it, just like the characters in "The Plague" did. In the oddest twist, this virus is (thankfully) not nearly as ferocious as that Black Plague in the book, so the enemy is not hammering down hard and long enough to make us feel a collective sense of urgency and brotherhood against it. There are no corpses in the streets, no wards filled with victims in every free building, no screams coming from houses. No. We are all on our phones or online if we do not have a job. We speak with others that are only of our like minds and nothing else. We watch news of the kind we only agree with. But, I am afraid to point out, many cities who are going through a blitz of deaths from the virus have been using their crematoriums all day and all night to take care of the victims. The book got one thing right, I guess.
The whole idea of the frog dying in water due to them not fearing danger due to the heat changing slowly enough to go without notice was proven wrong. As was stated: If you put a front in boiling water, it will die. If you put a frog in cold water, it will live but will jump out once it hits a certain temperature. The frogs, you see, don't like to sit still and they will jump out to survive. But, the scientist noted, you can't have a pot on the lid because, well, it will escape if it allowed to.
After these past few days and looking at the road ahead, I am certain that many people place the lid on their own pot.
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