COVID-19, etc.

Like everyone else, I have been paying lots of attention to the COVID-19 crisis, but in addition to not having time to comment on it, I’ve also felt there’s little need for more commentary than we are already being subjected to. But for the record, here are a few of my random personal thoughts related to it.

“The elderly should stay home and keep safe, yet at the same time accept the fact they are expendable.” Maybe because I am 17 years on the far side of the threshold to elderly-ness but don’t often feel that old, I am having a hard time accepting either proposition, much less holding them simultaneously in my mind. But I am/we are doing as we’ve been advised to do, and our children have not had to hound us about it, too much.

We moved to our new home at Breckenridge Village (a community for people of a certain age) looking forward to a promised and enticing array of exciting activities and new friendships. Within three weeks we were pretty much grounded. Probably won’t get a refund, however: they/we are paying security folks to take our temperatures every time we come back from a thrilling shopping expedition to buy toilet paper or get prescriptions filled.

FOUR PERSONAL RESPONSES TO AMERICA’S LONG-STANDING DISTRUST OF SCIENCE, MUCH OF WHICH IS GROUNDED IN FUZZY AMERICAN POP RELIGION, WITH NO SMALL DOSE OF FUNDAMENTALISM THROWN IN:

1. It is okay with me if you don’t believe the science of evolution. You even have my permission to think the earth is flat, although I rather you not pilot my next flight to Europe because we might end up headed toward the moon.

2. It’s not nearly as okay with me if you do not believe the science of climate change, but maybe there’s yet time to change your mind — maybe.

3. It’s not at all okay with me if you do not believe the sciences of infectious disease and epidemics and pandemics and your ignorance supports decisions that result in COVID-19 being even more deadly than it already is on the way to being. I am expendable, and am willing to be so, but won’t be happy if pollyanna politics is the reason I get expended. (Thank you, President Trump, for abandoning your plan to set some of us free by Easter.)

4. Once this crisis is over, we need to get back to changing minds on climate change, based on peer-reviewed and generally-accepted science.

Yes, we have moved. So why have I been too busy to share my profundities about COVID-19? For one thing, there’s always another box to unpack or picture to hang. For another, I trust I am in the final stages of getting Ghosts and Gold: My Story of Ghost Ranch off to the printer. Maybe it will be published (will “drop”) and Ghost Ranch will reopen about the same time. That would be so cool!

I wondered as I packed several big old books for our move to a much smaller home — as I packed my Hebrew and Greek texts and language tools, Calvin’s Institutes, and the like—I wondered why? Why keep them at all? I hardly ever refer to them, and doubt I will do so very often in our exciting new life here. Yet, they remind me of the most intense time of learning and growth and change in my life. They recall me to what has really mattered to me all my life. From their shelf behind me, they say far more to and about me than the diploma I long ago took off my study walls: It’s really not the destination; it is the journey.

Be safe, stay safe, and keep others safe.