Your Voice Mail Was Full Again

Hey Chuck.  Your birthday is coming up tomorrow, and it’s the Year 2020, so I thought I’d provide an update on what’s been going on.

Remember back in’89 when they convinced 1/7^th of the state’s population to stay indoors one night per week while they “sprayed for medflies” from helicopters flying in formation?  Even though they insisted the stuff they were spraying was safe for humans but not for your car’s paint, it was “best to stay indoors.”  That was a good excuse, and it worked so well then that now, with some tweaks, they’ve got ½ of the nation’s population staying indoors all the time while brave people struggle again to contain an invading bug, and they’re shaming people who don’t.

Remember back in ’79 when we waited in long lines on our appointed even or odd day for gasoline and were happy to get what we got?  Now they’ve got us wearing surgical masks and standing in line for toilet paper and being happy when we get some.

This time they’ve gone all in. 

They closed all the restaurants and bars and movie theaters and schools and casinos and all other  “non-essential” places, and they even closed the beaches and the golf courses.  They suspended the NBA and NHL and NASCAR seasons and cancelled March Madness.  They even cancelled MLB Opening Day and postponed the Olympics and The Masters. 

Oh, and get this: Tom Brady signed with Tampa Bay!

3 million people filed for unemployment last week.  Duh! Because they closed everything! That’s at least a 10-fold increase from the prior week and nearly a 5-fold increase over the previous highest week in history.  Suffice it to say, “This never happened under Obama.”

Some people say our lives will never be the same again.  Others say this is going to last longer than many people think, which is a little less depressing because it implies that things will eventually get back to “normal.” Others say we’ll all be back in church by Easter.  Oh, yeah, they have also cancelled in-person church services, and even the Pope is now live streaming his weekly blessing.

Social media is starting to split into camps – silly camp, let’s get serious about this camp, angry at the media camp, and Trump admin is Incompetent camp.

The silly camp is posting pictures of pets dressed in funny costumes, memes about learning how hard it is to be a home school teacher to their own kids or to self-quarantine, and toilet paper jokes.

The serious camp is posting various versions of “Come on, People, this is serious, get with the program, wash your hands and stay inside and give praise to the first responders, ” sometimes backing it up with first person narratives from the horror pits that hospitals have become.

The angry at the media camp is all, “thousands of people die from the flu each year; this is just the lamestream fake news media stirring up fear and hatred to steal the election from Trump in November and let’s go to the beach.”  An offshoot of this group has recently taken up the “old people should die to save their country” banner, but fortunately for me and Grandpa their banner doesn’t have much wind behind it. People in this camp are also the folks most likely to call the invading bug “China Virus.”

The Trump is Incompetent camp, unfortunately, is still trying to argue facts in a post-factual age.  Their facts all tend toward historical facts about which nothing can be done now anyway, and the angry at the media camp doesn’t even bother to offer alternative facts to confuse people any more.

In my experience, the silly camp is the only one that doesn’t wave the flag in support of their view.

Of course, there are also the fringe conspiracy theorists who say the virus is a man-made weapon, maybe one that got loose accidentally, maybe targeted.  Who can say?

Speaking of church services being cancelled, Tia Wera died today (not from the virus, I don’t think), 24 years to the day after Uncle Pat died. How about that!  We probably won’t get to have a funeral in the Mission, or anywhere, anytime soon, or tacos afterwards. 

Meanwhile NASA keeps announcing they have found a new asteroid that might crash into earth in the coming days or weeks, and ESPN is showing reruns of marble races. 

You’d hate it.