Backyard and Beyond

I am struck by the case of the now notorious Maine wedding, whose participants took the pandemic to a rural town and killed at least seven people. None of the murdered victims were at the wedding — the insidiousness of a virus is that it spreads beyond one’s kin and ken. Long term care worker’s kid went to the wedding; care worker took it to long term facility, etc. The half of the wedding party who got COVID-19 all survived, as most people who get it do. But this was in August: the wedding party chose to gather in the midst of a pandemic. This is why I call it murder. By the way, the officiant, some kind of religion-huckster who attaches “reverend” to his name, was unrepentant, rushing to a “religious liberty” law firm so that he would have the “freedom” to kill again for his blood-thirsty god.

Something to think about today when millions have traveled for Thanksgiving, militantly defiant against public health measures, unconcerned about strangers as well as their families, with their monstrous disdain for the nation’s overwhelmed frontline hospital workers.

This is particularly interesting on the ins and outs of COVID metrics: weekends and holidays mean drops in data (less people at work, less people testing, etc), so it will take some time for the holiday’s murderous surge to be reflected in the numbers. Took a full month for results of the Maine Wedding Murders to be known, and that was in a state that was then relatively unstressed by the pandemic.

This pieces explains some of the thinking behind taking risks in ignorance. Without experiencing something personally, or leaning about it from a trusted source, many reject the evidence before their very eyes. And when their trusted source is a compulsive liar and con man like Trump (remarkably, many take his word as holy writ)…

Reading this piece, I thought of two things that should have counteracted this “natural” response to the pandemic. One is history. After all, the human species has been here before, many times, over and over again. History can be something of a vaccine to this human tendency to be stupid.

So there’s history, which I analogize to a vaccine because it’s an injection from outside. But I also think of empathy, something that should be at least partially innate, meaning coming from within.