Silver Linings: Thoughts on CoronaVirus, Stay At Home Quarantine and Culture

I've basically been in the same "stay at home" mode since February 28th. That was the day I took my Mom to the ER with breathing issues. Of course, even though the nation was not on alert,  COVID-19/Wuhan Virus/CoronaVirus/Chinese Virus was on the radar and was what I feared, since Mom lives in a senior independent living apartment community. But that wasn't the cause-along with diabetes and leukemia, Mom has Congestive Heart Failure. As a result, fluid was pooling in her lungs. I spent two weeks traipsing to the hospital twice a day to monitor progress. She pulled through and on March 11 was moved to a rehab center. Then the hammer dropped. That day her rehab went on lockdown in Collin County. Mom's apartment complex also went on lockdown meaning she could not reenter, even though she's paying the exorbitant rent these facilities demand and was coming from another center due to lockdown. Humana, her insurance, tried to literally shove her out the door over the protests of doctors and physical therapists. Luckily we have just enough to last until the end of April.

I guess you can call that a silver lining, although I would call a pox on Humana leadership that during this crisis seem to have no scope for how people's hands are tied by the legal ramifications of lockdowns and quarantines.Some of the senior nursing homes are seeing clusters of COVID-19 erupt. So far, where Mom is living is safe and she is safe, although bored out of her mind. The staff there is very kind and on strict order where they can't go anywhere even on their own time. I truly appreciate people who are making enormous sacrifices for the welfare of others. When I'm allowed I will  make this up to them. So Mom's safety is a silver lining.

All this could, and did, depress me. I miss my kids. I miss going out with friends. I miss shopping at the store. But on the other hand, I'm out walking twice a day with my dog and saying hello to people I don't know-an unusual behavior in most urban settings. The constant hum of rush hour traffic has dulled where I can hear birds sing in the morning. It makes me feel like Cinderella. The air is fresher and with the abundant rain, the yards and parks are lush with new growth. Since the city has furloughed many workers in parks, these places will begin to grow wild, providing habitats for all kinds of animals and birds in time.

I looked at my bank account and found we spent a thousand dollars LESS staying home. We're not gadabouts, but that number stunned me. I'm cooking and baking more. I'm more careful to avoid waste. I'm having to be very creative because I never know what will be depleted in the store. One day there's no cheese. The next there's no eggs. There's always a lack of frozen food and the fresh produce is come and go. In spite of this we've managed to have enchiladas, steak, hamburgers and shrimp creole from food I stored in the freezer. The silver lining beyond having food to eat is that my husband can never ever again gripe about me buying and storing too much food.

On a larger scale I'm wonder what work at home and homeschooling are doing for and to our culture. I believe that prior to this situation, many Americans were lacking in compassion and empathy for others. Humans had been reduced by modern society to pixels on a screen. The enforced family togetherness is limiting the outside influence of peers to teens. This in turn may change behavior as the outrageous acting out that gets attention in most public schools only gets a shrug or a glare when Mom or Dad are working right across the table from you. I had to laugh when I saw the news stories with parents complaining the lessons they were expected to present were "too hard" or that their children were goofing off and not completing work. Not so easy, is it parents? A million teachers just laughed.

Perhaps from this parents will learn how to establish some discipline, stop blaming teachers for their kids' failures and get more kids off of medications they don't need once structure is applied. That would be a big silver lining. Before you attack, my youngest son is ADHD and was on Ritalin for a long time. When he was 18 he demanded to stop. He hated the way it made him feel. He's managed to become successful in sales. Imagine the 4, 5, and 6 years old enduring these feelings and having no words to describe what is happening to their brains and bodies.Wouldn't having fewer kids on medications be a silver lining?

I wonder if all the cities that offered tax abatements to entities like Amazon and IKEA will suddenly find they don't need all that subsidized office space. My daughter works for a Very Big Bank in their fraud division. She's been working at home since early February. She does her job well, she's not as tired because she doesn't have a 45 minute commute each way  She does miss her friends and performing, but for fun she's turned her garage into a dance studio and is teaching online dances from musicals she's choreographed. My daughter in law is also working at home five days a week, actually logging overtime since her large global company lost an entire call center in American Samoa. I believe that just like homeschooling, there are some who will be reluctant to return to their office cubicles where, let's be honest here, there's so much wasted time. Getting to work at home and having it become more common is definitely a silver lining.

For those in service oriented jobs, being there is a necessity. My two sons each have jobs that require their presence. One works in automotive, the other in bikes. Both are supposed to be working service only, but my youngest son's retail store is getting hammered by people insisting they are entitled to come in and buy stuff. My youngest used to be a bouncer and at six foot four inches and 240 lbs, is built like a linebacker, it's not a good idea to argue with him. He's trying to keep his skeleton staff safe by limiting it to five in the store. I don't know why people have to be belligerent. That they have jobs, even with reduced hours, is a blessing.

On a national scale, I wonder if people will start paying more attention to what they see as opposed to what other people are telling them. I don't see how anyone could watch the task force daily and then believe what is being spewed in the media. I am also wondering if people will start paying attention to secondary stories. I think the stories on the misuse of FISA is huge and that's absolutely being buried by all the CoronaVirus coverage. The story is important because it demonstrates that under the Obama administration DOJ, the FBI was indulging in absolutely illegal, unconstitutional behavior. Likewise the emerging insider trading scandals related to the congressional COVID-19 closed door meeting is another example of corruption that needs to come forward. I think all those participating should be prosecuted including Nancy Pelosi, who right after the hearings bought five million in Amazon stock. That kind of behavior being ousted from Congress would be a silver lining indeed.

In the end, this is all going to come down to attitude. I hope I don't get this virus. There's no real assurance that I won't, but likewise there's no way to know that I haven't already had it and gotten better. I have allergies all the time. Fall and Spring are major allergy triggers for me. I sneeze and cough pretty much all year round. I feel like I need a shirt with a disclaimer "Not Positive, But Allergic" for going to the store. That being said, I'm looking at the numbers and while not great, they aren't as bad as some are claiming. I'm reading about Sweden and Denmark where there are allowing herd immunity to rule. I'm curious if protocols established will work and if some, perhaps even many, of the deaths attributed to COVID-19 were actually only a minor cause for much larger issues that were ignored for the sake of media headlines. Moving the American public away from blind allegiance to ANY media source and returning them to a renewed vigilance on their own constitutional rights. And that would be a big shiny silver lining right there.

Puzzles and Pestilence

So boys and girls, here we are in the Age of Corona. And not the good kind you can drink with a nice Mexican dinner on the beach. Somehow a rogue virus escaped it's laboratory moorings and ran wild in the general population. If we are to believe the Chinese officials, this was all accidental. Then again, the Chinese have a cultural need to "save face" that predates the era of Mao.

I've been doing puzzles and reading mysteries since I was nine. Word puzzles are the best. Confusing mysteries, especially set in a specific place, are amazing because it's like visiting a location or time. I read mysteries set in Rome, mysteries set on the Navajo Rez, even mystery thrillers that reflect our worst fears from the headlines. Puzzles are fun to figure out. Mysteries are fun to anticipate. It's become a habit to look at situations and wonder "What if.....?"

Consider epidemics. Human history is full of them. The Black Death, The Spanish Flu, Polio, AIDS, Zika were surges of disease that ravaged different populations. I remember the Polio Epidemic of the late 1950's. As a very young child I remember lining up in the school gym of Dowling Elementary waiting to get my sugar cube in a paper condiment cup soaked with a vaccine engineered by Jonas Salk. The AIDS epidemic was frightening because it was a communicable disease that nobody wanted to really discuss. We've had disease promoted by poor hygiene, crowded populations and utter disregard for access to vaccinations. But this time is different.

The "Corona Virus" or COVID-19 if you prefer, appears to be an engineered virus. The prefix "novel" means it hasn't been identified prior to this outbreak. That doesn't mean it didn't exist, but it most likely didn't exist in a human accessed format. To look more closely we need to look at Wuhan. (and NO it is not "racist" to call this the Wuhan virus any more than it was racist to call the Spanish Flu by that name...). Wuhan, in the Hubei province of China has been a huge research entity for awhile now. Maybe it's just a coincidence that COVID-19 manifested in that region, but since the 1960's many of our flu bugs seem to originate there. The way epidomologists look at mass infections of populations is to use timelines and maps. Here are a few examples:

Real time chart of COVID-19 outbreak (made by a 17 year old! If you go there, give him some props)

I'm putting in some graphics mainly to get people to focus. But you should go to the website linked HERE and investigate for yourself.

So here's your outbreak. Here's the path of the pathogens as it were (Biology pun, I love gallows humor). We can see it started in China, with the "official" date of 12/24/2019 which is most likely a month later than it was really first introduced into the human petri dish of Chinese culture.  From there, for awhile, the second largest outbreak was in Iran. This is dark humor indeed since they claim to have nothing to do with the Chinese officially. The existence of the virus in Iran proves otherwise. From there the virus moves to Italy which is now second in terms of total cases and deaths. Part of this is due to the aging population in Italy, but it also says a great deal about crowded conditions and open borders. Both play a role in this morality play.

From there, the third largest cluster is in Washington state. This is not an accident. While folks rant about the lack of security on our southern border, people from all over the world literally walk across from Canada, many of them in Washington state. Let's not forget that Washington is a "Sanctuary State" where people are discouraged from asking questions or making observations about the living conditions of others. Even now, I am willing to bet that the tolerant folks in Seattle are loathe to ask someone who is sitting on the bus by them coughing if they have COVID-19. This idea that you should not defend yourself from something or someone who could be a threat is a very dangerous idea. But that is the nature of what has happened in the culture of the Left Coast.

The first and worst outbreak was in a senior rest home. If I was an investigator, I would look at workers who were dealing with multiple patients. This would point to nursing staff, but even more to food handlers and service workers. If I was a profiler I would say this was a member of the food services staff who was ill or living with someone who was ill. It is likely they don't speak English and were fearful of being turned over to ICE. What's scarier, that same person may be working at multiple facilities. Remember food services means not just rest homes, but also hospitals, schools, public buildings. Look up the history of Typhoid Mary if you want a similar scenario in real life.

As a result, Americans who are currently raised to believe they can control outcomes are panic buying things like bleach, toilet paper and bottled water. God knows I'd rather face the apocalypse with a good bottle of Bourbon and a cheeseburger, but I digress. We have a generation that doesn't know how to handle adversity AT ALL. They seek internet solutions and blame politicians when none of that has any bearing on when and where the virus landed. All I can say is thank God the "Greatest Generation" had enough balls to endure the deprivation of the Great Depression and the mobilization of WWII because I'm not sure the current crop of young people could do it. Sometimes you have to learn how to respond in spite of your fears. When I think of the college kids with safe rooms because they can't endure the words of a conservative speaker or the people who melt down because they don't like who gets elected, I wonder if some massive psy-op program has removed maturity from the population.

Now we get to the total conjecture part of my column.
IF I was an evil villain intent on destroying Western Civilization, how would I do it?
The Chinese are reliant on American and European markets for their newfound wealth. They would not knowingly destroy it. But with wealth, also comes envy. There are many Chinese millionaires now. There are also many underpaid tech workers who are more interested in acquiring wealth than moral and ethical concerns. These folks are probably not particularly knowledgable about the nature of research in Wuhan. Nor would the Chicoms inform them of the potential danger. So selling off some deceased lab animals to local wet markets, or worse, deliberately running off with live virus material to sell at a premium on the dark web isn't that much of a muchness to them. Enter the Source (which the Chinese government is probably still trying to find.)

The Source, being an opportunist, bumbles the security measures, likely infecting his family, his friends, his neighborhood. This is the more deadly L-Strain that has so many panicked. For those bemoaning the naming of this virus, please note that the Chinese called it Wuhan 1. Now enters the Buyer. What region or nation desires to destroy Western culture which it view as an abomination? Let's go to the map and timeline. Early after the Chinese infections were named, which nation was second? Correct, it was Iran. So we have the feckless Source selling to a Buyer intent on attempting bioterrorism on a large scale. Iranians know they can't get into Israel. They'd be stopped before they could reach the Wailing Wall. But Italy houses the seat of early Christiandom in the location of the Vatican and the person of the Pope. Even though Catholics are DEEPLY divided on the nature and intentions of the current Pontiff, he is the figurehead for a huge number of Catholics around the world. Please notice that Italy has had to deal with EU's open border policies and so could not check who is coming in or from where. Italy now has the second most cases and deaths.

The numbers will only grow. It's causing social and political chaos here and abroad. It's reshaping the social functions of the US as we recoil from gatherings and indeed are canceling festivals and events faster than Antifa can cancel Ben Shapiro. This doesn't feel like a "normal" epidemic to me. It feels like something else. And I think it feels like something more to others as well. I do wish for once politicians would stop using this to push agenda. I also wish that we could shut down social media for a few days until cooler heads prevail. IF something is going on here beyond what the MSM is being allowed to tell us for security reasons, I hope, at some point, they will let us know the truth. But then again they told us they'd open all the records on the JFK assassination after fifty years and that didn't happen either.

If you liked this column, send me a roll of toilet paper. Kidding.....sort of.