A Time to Mourn
There’s been a lot to mourn about over the past several years. Obviously, the loss of 600,000+ Americans is on top of that list when it comes to COVID-19. Everyone has either lost someone close to them or knows someone who has. However, that’s not the type of mourning that has been on my mind. Instead, I’m mourning the loss of civility and intelligent debate that we used to have concerning complex issues.
The Texas Tribune released one of those stories that surprises no one. For those that don’t want to go down the rabbit hole, they basically said that resuming in person instruction in Texas accelerated the spread of the virus. Knock me over with a feather. That falls under the category of news that isn’t really news. It’s more the kind of common sense that seems to be a lot less common these days. When you deny science and deny logic like this you end up getting this kind of news story.
Yet, there has been something else going on this year in schools that is also impossible to deny. Failures are up. Frustration is up. It is much more difficult to teach students remotely and it is much more difficult for them to learn. Furthermore, it is also more difficult for students to enjoy school when many of their extracurricular activities have either been canceled or limited. They are not feeling the connection they need to succeed. I’m not sure how that can be replicated in a virtual environment and this is supposed to be what I’m an expert at.
This is where the mourning comes in. We used to be a people that could acknowledge both of these facts and then have a somewhat intelligent debate on how to move forward. The more heads we put together the better we usually do. We have made awesome innovations as a society so maybe someone can come up with a way to offer connection and keep people safe. Naturally, a part of that is getting as many people vaccinated as possible, but when you have people denying the jab just to own the libs it impossible to do that universally. Idiots have always been among us, but it seems we have more of them.
These are the same idiots that seem to think having more guns in society makes us safer. It seems that the police are drawing a chalk line around common sense and fewer and fewer people are able to identify the victim. It’s not that we have complex problems like those in our schools. It is that fewer and fewer people seem to want to try to tackle them. I know we are supposed to fight when the idiots try to fight culture wars instead of tackling real issues. Unfortunately, there is just an overwhelming sadness that this is where we are at.
We are drowning in a rising tide of stupid.
1Yes, a tide of stupid and angry.
2A compendium of frustration, of loss, of hatred, of incredulity.
Nightmarish power. Corporations are not following the script of sounding off on voting rights. They are instead secretly funding anti democracy measures…(true)… perhaps the ultimate nightmare. Its the unreality that gets to you. As a child I experienced dreams of myself in the womb with remembrances of it upon waking.
oneirology the science and interpretation of dreams.
Not a solution but perhaps an explanation:
The Lathe of Heaven – last aired on PBS in 1980
From the novel by Ursula K. LeGuin
streaming:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8VRbaVNvSA
3Nick, here’s a challenge for you as a historian. Not the pamphlet “Common Sense” as authored by Thomas Paine, but who first coined the notion of ‘common sense’? Not a trick question; I don’t know the answer. But thinking if we could locate and study a probably age old source, we might discover when we began losing our grip on the notion.
4NPR did a feature yesterday on Greenville, TN where the Southern Baptists/GOP run the town and the vaccination rate was 31%. When I heard the ignorance displayed by the people questioning the vaccine by parroting RW crap (aborted stem cells, the vaccine was developed too quickly, microchips) my first thought was “Let them die”. Sadly these good “Christian” folks don’t mind killing others as a result of their willful ignorance.
5@Sam #4 – I heard that story, too!
The part that I found so sad, though, was that one of the local doctors would spend hours with folks answering their questions about the vaccine. When someone agreed to get the shot, the doctor couldn’t give it to them then and there – no supply in his office. Rather, he had to tell them to make an appointment elsewhere.
It sounds like TN is now where VA was in January – disorganized and disjointed as heck with confusing sign-up procedures depending on who’s providing the shots.
6Microchip in the vaccine? Nanotech? The dang feds tracking you if you have gotten the vaccine?
Isn’t that cute.
Your cell phone can talk to nearby cell phone towers. To do that it uses an antenna, very thin, but nearly the height and width of the cell phone itself. And it has four other antennas, each two or three inches long. And it has a battery. And you have to recharge that battery frequently or the whole thing stops.
Idiots who think you can fit a two and a half inch by five inch antenna into a microchip so small that it can be injected through the tiny needle used for the vaccine are . . . well, idiots.
Idiots who think you can fit a battery through that needle — and the battery never needs charging — are, again, idiots.
Here’s the info on cell phone antennae. Warning: starts off geeky and accelerates from there.
https://www.antenna-theory.com/design/cellantenna.php
7I agree with Katherine, at the top of the thread. I have no idea how we got there, but our educational standards seem to have slipped badly. We need to spend more on education, especially on teaching critical thinking. Waaaay too many people can’t seem to separate fact from fiction, or science from woo. We HAVE to fix that, soon.
8How did we get here? Just wondering what things would be like in the spring of 2021 had the liar in chief taken the same aggressive stance in the spring of 2020 as the current administration. While the vaccine wasn’t available then, the other steps would have helped mitigate the spread and possibly made a difference in how many idiots still roam the country now. After all, his cult listened to him along with the RW talking heads. Instead, the big orange liar encouraged the idiots to fight masks and other steps and later, vaccines. The result is the high number of repugnantican idiots still helping spread the virus and growth of variants of covid, and the need for the distance learning that we have had for over a year.
9