Through with This Flu

What was that Hunter Thompson line? “How weird must things become before your love will crack?” Something like that. I’m too lazy to Google it.

Something that occurred to me right after posting my piece on the Chinese Flupalooza earlier this month was that Spring Break, that lucrative Dionysian bunching of young, scantily clad college student bodies at southern beaches, was canceled, too. Of course, college classes were canceled along with school in general, so every week is Spring Break now. 

Then Florida opened her beaches this week. There was a bit of grumbling, with a few pointed shrieks of how this would be a disaster, and boy aren’t people from Florida stoooooopid! It went away very quickly. Except for the Tweet below, I haven’t seen much on this. I don’t expect to, either, for the simple reason that this will not result in hospitals filled to capacity with dying sunbathers, any more than the phlegm-sodden stacks of bodies are filling those sidewalks where the numerous homeless still sleep unmolested.

So sorry to disappoint, eh?

What bothers me is what’s going to happen when a truly deadly contagion comes along, like the Spanish Flu of just over a century ago. The Spanish Flu didn’t single out the elderly and immuno-compromised as the Wuhan Flu does (it’s serious enough if you’re in either of these demographics; don’t get me wrong), but the young and ostensibly healthy. 

As it turns out, the state and local officials in too many places have gotten too obviously giddy with their emergency powers, and more people than before are questioning the wisdom—and, more critically, the moral integrity—of the people in charge. I’d thought the lockdowns and closures would be lifted two weeks ago. I’d hazard that most things will be opened up by the end of April, but I’ve been humbled before the Disney-villain-grade hubris of the powers that be. “What, you don’t like being locked down for a week? How about two months, then! Keep pushing us, peasants!”

I will say this: if things aren’t at least on their way back to something approaching normal by summer...authority will be challenged. How, I don’t know. But it’s already being challenged in some quarters. The natives grow restless.

The biggest casualty of this so-called pandemic is trust in people we need to be able to trust. Now we see everyone is serving an agenda. Everyone. There is not one honest soul out there. If the number crunchers don’t like a certain elected official in question, the numbers will be juiced to make that official look bad. We see this every day. We already know many deaths from other causes have been attributed to this flu.  We can’t trust our own government’s statistics any more than we can trust China’s.

Most of these state- and local-ordered social restrictions are arbitrary and serve no other purpose than for other elected officials to throw their weight around and show they’re doing something. We see some using the “crisis” as an opportunity to get some pet causes advanced. The panic mongers will make excuses along the lines of “can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs,” but few will buy ‘em. 

People were already jaded and cynical to a degree. Now they’re getting really jaded and cynical.

I have no idea what’s to become of all of this, but as the old saying goes, it’s no way to run a whorehouse. When the real pandemic shows up, a real crisis...yeah. You know it.