“Stupid don’t wash off.”
Is it possible that we Americans really are this stupid?
Until a couple of months ago, we were trying to figure out a way to go to Virginia for Christmas.
We had a pretty good reason for it. Our two children, their spouses and our six grandchildren are all in Virginia this Christmas, and that’s something that doesn’t happen all the often. It happened in 2009, when there was only one grandchild and we flew from California to see them.
We were 11 years younger than we are now as well as healthier. And of course there was no pandemic we needed to avoid.
Pauline went from there to Indonesia and Virgile went to his first posting in Greece.
Foreign Service families — especially those with more than one foreign service officer — aren’t often fortunate enough to have everyone in the same place at the same time.
So with Pauline doing language training in Arabic for her next posting, and Virgile in D.C. for a three-year tour at headquarters, this year was our big chance. Of course 2020 was the year that completely whacked us with our own health problems.
And of course, the pandemic.
Until early October, I was doing what I could to find a safe form of travel. Airlines didn’t look good, and the last time I rode the Big Gray Dog was in 1973. I thought about a compartment on Amtrak, but Nicole didn’t like that when we did it a few years ago.
Driving seemed like the only way to go, but it’s a 1,350 mile round trip, and we would have to deal with motels and restaurants as well. We decided to stay home.
Seems like a shame more people aren’t doing the same thing. Health officials have been begging people to avoid big holiday gatherings. Thanksgiving caused a bump upward in infections, and Christmas figures to be even worse. Travel is down from last year, but TSA agents have processed more than a million travelers a day for the last four days.
In fact, it’s possible 2020 might be the worst Christmas in this country since World War II.
Consider:
— roughly 320 thousand Americans dead from COVID-19.
— an economy going down the drain because of the virus.
— a president who just might be trying to pull the country down with him in the last month of his term.
We’ll never know, but it would be very interesting to know the percentage of people who decided to go ahead and travel and voted for Trump. Traveling against medical advice is certainly a selfish thing to do, especially if people say they’re doing it because they can protect themselves from infection. Whether they know it or not, they might be infected and asymptomatic, and might be infecting the people they visit or those they see when they return home.
It all goes back to one thing, way back toward the beginning. Trump downplayed the virus and suggested that whether or not to wear a mask was a freedom issue. He said people should wear masks if that was what they wanted to do, but then he negated that advice by making fun of people who chose to wear masks.
In the middle of the 14th century, between 75 and 200 million people died from the black plague. The world population at the end of the plague was 370 million, so more than a third of the people in the world died. That’s considered the worst pandemic ever.
The Spanish Flu a century ago took 50 million lives, as did World War II. As of 2018, about 32 million people have died of AIDS.
Europe is certainly doing its best, and the discovery of a newer, more contagious version of the virus has resulted in much of Europe closing its borders with the United Kingdom. Hundreds of truck transports are stalled on both sides of the border, waiting to transport vital goods and supplies.
Over here, Trump is reportedly still trying to decide what to do about the UK. Probably somewhere in between how he’d react to China (blame them) and Russia (exonerate them).
What now looks like politics at best and ignorance at worst on Trump’s part is going to look worse and worse as the fatality total climbs, and the political divisions in this country will only make it worse as Trump’s minions do silly things to rebel against Trump’s opponents.
If we were 40 and in good health, we might try to find a way to travel for Christmas. But we’re neither, so we’ll stay home.
Pauline and her family will be there till summer, so there’s at least a chance we’ll be able to travel to see them by spring.
By then we’ll have had a real president for two or three months.
Who knows how much of a difference that will make?