STRUGGLING TO ACCESS MY INNER TIGGER

Thank you all for your warm words in response to my brooding post. As I struggle to understand the mindset of parents harassing teachers and healthcare professionals who are trying to protect their children’s lives, I thought to look back at what came to be called the black plague, which is to say the bubonic plague. According to Wikipedia, over a period of 10 or 15 years in the 14^th century, it killed between a third and a half of the entire population of Europe!

 

By way of contrast, Covid has killed roughly 2/10 of 1% of the American population, and much of that death has been in nursing homes and other segregated places. Even when the pandemic is described as “raging” among the unvaccinated, the percentage of people actually dying or getting seriously ill is tiny.  Perhaps that helps to explain why people allow themselves to embrace myths, hoaxes, and fantasies even in communities hard-hit by the virus.  Nevertheless, I cannot imagine being the parent of a young child and protesting violently against people trying to protect my child’s life and health. There is a sickness abroad in this land not carried by a coronavirus and it threatens to kill what remains of American democracy.

 

I cannot tell whether Biden simply cannot grasp the seriousness of the problem, or alternatively understands it quite well enough and thinks that his only chance of defending the country is to pass massive spending bills that so directly and positively affect so many people that Democratic candidates can hold their seats in 2022 and again in 2024.

 

On another matter overwhelming my sangfroid, namely global warming and climate change, although there has been an enormous amount of attention paid to this subject recently, relatively little of it has focused on the disrptions that will be produced by climate change in such things as the size, location, and fertility of agricultural lands and the concomitant large-scale migrations that such changes will necessitate. Harking back to my comments some weeks ago about fertility rates and their implications for population growth or decline, by the middle of the current century – well after I have gone – the world is going to see population movements that will create huge and quite possibly unmanageable conflicts between so-called “First World” populations, which are declining in number, and so-called “Third World” populations, which are soaring in numbers. This will be a good deal more serious than simply the inevitable loss of beachfront properties in Florida or North and South Carolina.