When the Long Road Floods

 Even when you are on the long road, floods stop you in your tracks.

I have not posted in some time because a great deal of stress has been going on in my life. Nothing pandemic related in absolute terms, but it has been a painful few weeks. Suffice to say, that matters little to the biology of what is going on. We are cresting and about to surge into new heights of infection. Why? Well, because the desire for what people want to do is far greater than what they should do.

Just so we are on the same historical page, yes, that sounds insane but it seems that is the way the United States has always handled such things. When one looks at the history of the Spanish flu and the AIDS crisis, we have had a history of the same behavior. Having been very much alive and aware during the AIDS crisis of the 1980's, I can tell you that the medical community was literally clueless as to what the hell was going on. How do I know this? My father was a dentist and I can very clearly recall the night he got called to an emergency meeting of the New Jersey Dentists Association. When he came home late that night, he looked rather broken and dazed, yet still stoic as was his usual presence. "Dad," I asked as he sat down slowly on the couch by the back door, "do they know what this is about and what to do?" He paused and said slowly , very slowly, "No. They have no clue."

My bones filled to absolute zero. This was a doctor who worked with spit and blood every single day, the two fluids that carried the then death virus. He was within the inner circle, one that was not touched by the media. When he told me they were basically at the whim of the virus, I understood how screwed this was.

But back then, AIDS was literally a death sentence. If you got it, 99.99% of the time you died a very long and painful death. But it was a virus that was mainly transmitted by acts that were denoted as sins by the politically religious. Sex, gay and straight, along with intravenous drug use (sharing needles with infected persons) was the main cause. basically you had to willing exchange fluids with someone to get it. And, I assure you this was the general vibe from the culture then, if you got this disease, you deserved it. I mean, if anyone chose to live such a lifestyle and contracted it, they were believed to be paying for their "crime". Again, trust me. I lived through this.

It was only after people who got blood transfusions for medical procedures and were inadvertently infected with the death virus when the tide of the media shifted. But they did so in the same way a middle school kid picks sides in a fight: one side is perfect and the other deserving of it. Long story short, it made those whose actions willing placed them in harm's way as the enemy and those who were innocently infected. In then end, when the populace understood that they were in harm's way, they finally cared.

The problem with this pandemic, if you can call it a "problem", is that this is not a real plague. The odds of death are nothing like the Black Death or AIDS. Not even close. But we are finding out that those who survive can have long lasting issues. So, in the harshest of terms, the odds of living are within the fair of the populace. Living. Not being damaged for life. 

What I am trying to get at is that due to the fact that there is a political element to not taking precautions as basic as a facemark (I cannot believe I just typed that reality), we are now about to enter another flood. But, just like the weather, it is not simply one factor. The political climate is literally at a crisis point. No joke, no cute sayings. We are at a definitive crossroads with the political state of this country. But we are also at an economic one. Wall Street is doing amazing, but that must fall to the math of cycles as well at some point. It will fall. And we are also at the starting point of a new wave of infection. We here in the Northern states may be spared another mass grave experience, but one cannot think so kindly towards fate.

We are literally dealing with a flood on this long road. We are crawling towards an election that everyone sees as an intimate game changer in every way. But biology and physics don't care. You get the cute kittens and the rainbows but you also get the spread of a virus. 

Right now, you wait in a safe place and you walk when you can, making each step very carefully so you are not swept away.