Yes, It Has Been Worse, And It REALLY Sucked

I had to chide a friend on Facebook because he kept trying to make folks feel -- OK, "better" is not the right word, but perhaps have a better perspective -- of the current world pandemic.

He'd just post random snippets: Two percent of the nation's population died in the Civil War.  A quarter of Europe died in the Black Death.

And so on. So, I asked him, "Are you saying don't sweat it if less than 1 percent of the population dies now? "

He insisted not, but still, his statements lacked context. I like to tell folks this is why you leave the writing of irony to professionals.

And we really have had some jerks imply that, sure, a 1 percent death rate (which would be 3 million Americans) would be sort of acceptable if it meant saving the economy.  The idiot lieutenant governor of Texas actually said old folk, who are rated most vulnerable to Covid-19, would certainly be willing to take a greater chance on dying if it means re-starting the economy sooner for their grandchildren.

No clue on whether he discussed this with his mother.

This quickly morphed into old folks being asked to die for the Dow.

Pat Bagley from the Salt Lake Tribune on one
method of slowing the pandemic.

Needless to say, as a 71-year-old member of that more susceptible class, I decline the honor of saving the economy.  And now I read that Trump is saying he'll consider it a victory if only 100,000 of us die, which I guess is an improvement.

One suspects he will try to claim that, but for his work, it would have been worse. I like to think that, but for his lollygagging and happy talk in January, or even his slacking off last year when he was clearly warned of critical deficiencies in our national preparations, we might be in much better shape now.

That said, the hard truth is that there really have been vastly worse disasters right here in this country, and world-wide even more.  More than half a million Americans died in the 1918 misnamed Spanish Flu (should be the Fort Riley, Kansas, flu). Nations do recover, although what they look like is never known until later and isn't always nice.

Interestingly, memories of such things are not really big.  I just watched an episode of the PBS Program "The American Experience" on the 1918 flu that said the process of forgetting it began almost immediately.  It wasn't anything intentional.  No books were burned or papers censored. People just didn't want to talk about it.  Horror is never fun.

Of a similar nature was the journal of the Great Depression years kept by one farmer who almost destroyed it because such a terrible time didn't deserve to be remembered.  Fortunately it was saved -- I can highly recommend "The Worst Hard Time" by Timothy Egan, which uses it and much else, to tell the story of the Dust Bowl.

How bad was that?  The title tells it. Never mind flu, just taking a breath of the dust-laden air could kill you.

The New York Times ran a story the other day mentioning that Samual Pepys (pronounced "peeps") described the Great Plague of 1665-1666, so I got out my copy to read up.

Wow.

Pepys was a British government official -- head of the navy, in fact -- who kept an amazing diary for almost 10 years, from 1660 to 1669, when his eyesight failed.  His diary covers several critical historical events and he was a very dedicated historian, writing much daily, in great detail.  His diary is a goldmine for anyone who wonders "what was life really like back then?"

His description of the plague is riveting. 

Thousand dying every week just in London.  People were ordered to "social distance" by staying home, and many feared to go out anyway. Then as now, nobody knew of any cure.

Plague doctor. The beak on the mask
held herbs to keep the disease away.

On Aug. 10, 1665, Pepys notes that he re-wrote his will. "And an odd story of Alderman Bence's stumbling at night over a dead corps (sic) in the street, and going home and telling his wife, and she at the fright, being with child, fell sicke and died of the plague."

On Aug. 28 he is "Up and being ready I out ... having not been for some days in the streets; but now few people I see, and those looking like people that had taken leave of the world."

On the 30th he notes "But Lord! How everybody's looks and discourse in the streets is of death and nothing else, and few people going up and down, that the towne (sic) is like a place distressed and forsaken."

By Sept. 16 all of London was a ghost town.

"Thence I walked to the Tower; but Lord! how empty the streets are and melancholy, so many poor sick people in the streets full of sores; and so many sad stories overheard as I walk, everybody talking of this dead, and that man sick, and so many in this place, and so many in that. They tell me that, in Westminster, there is never a physician and but one apothecary, all being dead, but there are great hopes of great decrease this week: God send it!"

Sound familiar?

Samuel Pepys

And then in September of 1666 the Great Fire of London struck.  By then 200,000 people had died of plague.  I see some  speculation that the fire, which destroyed most of central London, helped stop the plague by killing all the rats and fleas. Every cloud has its silver lining, I guess.

That has to be seen as an unintentional byproduct, however, and I sincerely hope no Texas government officials are considering that method of stoping the current pandemic. It would boost the building trades, it is true, but still, let's not.

You can download the diary of Samuel Pepys for free from Project Gutenberg (click here.)

The diary also has its own web site so you can read whatever you want, or just "today in Samuel Pepys Diary" at this site (click.)

I can strongly recommend "The Worst Hard Time" by Timothy Egan.  You can find used copies for essentially the price of postage at Abebooks.com.

You can watch the PBS video of the 1918 influenza here (click.)

Who Made This Crap? China, of course!

There's this great scene in the film "Armageddon" with Bruce Willis where the space shuttle they are using to get away from the death astroid is broken.

Something's wrong with one of its complex, sensitive parts and the engine won't start.

So the Russian cosmonaut, who always sounds drunk, starts wailing away at it with a wrench screaming "American components, Russian components, it's all the same and it's all made in Taiwan!" at which point sparks fly, the engine kicks over up and everyone goes home happy.

Except Bruce. But earth is saved, so fair deal (click here for clip).

Where's that Russian guy when we need him?

I was asking my son the other day "Who do I kill to make all this stop?" OK, I have some anger issues but I suspect even that drastic a measure, let along wailing at something with a wrench, is not going to
fix this mess.

Interesting article in the New York Times today (click here) about the really incredibly silly situation the US finds itself in: It can't buy enough 75 cent face masks.

The irony hit me while walking the dog. An F35 -- $130 million -- flew over.  We've bought a few hundred of those, and more are on the way, because someone decided we needed to stock up on F35s.

But the strategic reserve of face masks, which we are now realizing is a critical wartime medical supply, reasonably should hold a billion or so of them. It had 35 million before this started and now sewing groups in cities and towns are learning how to make them again because industry can't.

Last time we had sewing groups making bandage and face masks, "Over There" was a hit on the radio and Kaiser Bill was on his last legs in World War I.

I kinda thought we'd gotten beyond that, what with this being the richest nation on the planet, but here we are (click).

Oh sure, order more from China, which makes 100 million a day. But China sells to China first. Can you blame them?

As the article makes clear, part of the larger problem is not just that critical medical supplies of all sorts, not just face masks, are now made in China.

Bean counters in industry, wanting to maximize shareholder value, looked for cheap labor to cut costs. Plus, a lot of the medical stuff we use these days is one-time and disposable. You get better sterility that way, but that's also how a typical hospital can use thousands of the things in one day.

The really big picture is how so vastly much of America's lower-tech production is gone overseas.  Economists like to point out that we supply the intellectual capital and produce a lot of higher-tech stuff -- like F35s -- and leave the cheap low-tech stuff to the Chinese.

That's great until you need something low-tech and the Chinese don't want to sell it to you.  Like a face mask.

And DO NOT blame the Chinese for any of this.  American businessmen made these decisions, nobody else. Remember how Whirlpool closed a factory in Evansville, Indiana, in 2010?  The place was making money, just not enough money. So off to Mexico went the jobs. But hey, look at these cheap washers and dryers!

There is also the problem of "just in time" production.  Nobody likes to keep inventory any more because piles of unsold stuff aren't making you money.

I suppose you can wonder why hospitals don't keep their own stocks to handle emergencies but, remember, hospitals in this country, anyway, are run to make money.  Bean counters control them too, and you know how bean counters feel about large inventories.

Been shopping for toilet paper lately?  National TP production was set to match demand. This worked fine until a national emergency caused everyone to feel a need to stock up.  If everyone only took two packs instead of their normal one, there's a 100 percent increase in demand with no production capacity to match it. Manufacturers are reluctant to increase capacity because this spike will end and then they'll have excess capacity sitting there not making them money.

We're seeing the same thing with bread, flour, sugar, other basics.  Even aspirin is backordered. How the heck does aspirin become short supply?

If Mexico ever decides to quit selling us vegetables we're going to be in big trouble. Utah is growing homes where it used to grow veggies. The state's best prime farmland in Davis County now grows, mostly, lawn.

Will the powers that be learn the lesson here? I'm not holding my breath.  Obama's administration used 100 million of the face masks in the strategic reserve for the H1N1 crisis and didn't replace them.

Trump's administration ran a simulation of a pandemic last year that pointed up this, and a lot of other problems, but apparently Trump's much vaunted business administration skills don't extend to restoring the inventory of face masks.

One hopes the coronavirus thing will get manageable in the near future, folks will calm down and start digging into the TP stocks clogging their garage and life will sort itself out.

It could be worse. Was talking my friend Larry this morning.   He's 81 and remembers some of the shortages during WWII when, he said, "everything was short," although he doesn't recall TP being an issue.

Wartime rationing prevented a lot of shortages by preventing excess buying; if you had flour coupons, you bought flour. No coupon, no flour.

Then it was shoe leather, he said. "I had to put cardboard in my shoes when the soles wore out. I remember my mom would get mad at me if I went out when it was wet because the cardboard would melt."

I have heard no hint that the Chinese are going to stop selling us shoes any time soon.  Because, of course, who do you think makes them? 

Of Social Distance and Political Idiots

Well, here my family all are, well into "social distancing," which is a fancy name for "stay the hell away from, well, everyone."

Family. Friends. Work. School. Everyone.

This is not easy. I have been crying for my grandchildren.  We are fortunate to live when we do, however.  I like to read stories about Arctic explorers, among other things, and the tales told of the 1800s are mostly of individuals, and teams, that went off to explore and didn't plan to come back for several years.

During all that time they were completely cut off -- no mail, no telephone, no radio, no hope of rescue if things got ugly.  "We'll be back in two years," was what they would say. "If we're not back in three, send someone to look."

Members of the doomed Franklin expedition, which went out in 1845 to find the Northwest Passage, left such a message. They are still being found where they died.

 .

So I can't complain when my entire family is up on my computer screen, my grandkids wiggling and squirming and playing games, trying to hog the spotlight.  It's chaos, but chaos I can be part of. And we're together.

This is not easy.  We humans need touch and closeness.  We are social animals and those are part of our make-up. One of my kids was telling me yesterday how deeply he missed his mother's hugs.

Families, especially, need everyone in that family.  Studies have shown that grandparents have a huge impact on their grandchildren's development.  They are critical for passing down family traditions, teaching family values, holding the whole family together.  Tribes that revere their elders do so because they know the critical role those elders play long after they are physically able to work, or fight.

And then we have Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick (click) who seems to think that America's elderly are expendable in this situation. Actually said they should accept higher risk for the greater economic good.

I've heard others say this -- that a certain level of death from this pandemic is inevitable and the question is how to balance effort with an acceptable level of dead. Mr. Patrick's statement strikes me as bravado from someone who, I am guessing, is actually pretty sure he will survive because he's so clever.

It's the old "Some of you may die, but it is a sacrifice I'm willing to make" thing. To which I replay, "Gee, thanks for the honor, but no thanks."

Sadly, doctors in ICUs around the world are having to make decisions that impact the elderly more already.  Given someone who is 80 years old and has a 5 percent chance of surviving, and one who is 40 with a 50 percent chance,  and only one ICU bed, they grit their teeth condemn the old one to die a lonely and horrible death.  (Click for NY Times Story Here)

But that's medical triage.  That happens.

This is economic triage, the argument that we're killing the nation's economy to save too few lives.

Anything about that ring harsh to you?  We've been hearing for years from folks like Mr. Patrick how precious all life is. Now he has a chance to prove it and he says, "Well, some lives, maybe not."

Doesn't that include mine?

I hear daily from my kids about how they want me to take care of myself. Stay home, they say. Stay safe.

My granddaughter made a cake and wrote "stuck together"
to show how we're all in this.

They get it, and I get it. Which is why I am absolutely paranoid at this point. I have to honor their work to keep myself safe.

But more, a family is an integrated unit.  It needs all its parts, equally, to survive and grow.  Folks like Mr. Patrick, who seems to think some parts are more equal than others, have an astonishingly jaded and selfish world-view.

But I hear you ask: "What about the consumer and service economy, which is, yes, more than 70 percent of the whole national economy? Will a 3-month shutdown ruin it?"

Let's have a little perspective here.

World War II turned Germany's economy -- service and industrial -- into flaming piles of rubble. Whole cities were laid waste. Unemployment was probably 90 percent. They were bartering cigarettes for food.

Ten years later, Germany was the industrial and "service economy" leader of Western Europe.  You honestly telling me the people of the United States couldn't do that?  Or more?

Trust me: Cruise ships will still be here. When this is over you'll still be able to get a haircut, go to a movie, eat dinner out.

Until then, stay together, all of us. We don't have anyone else, and none of us is expendable.

Of Wounded Dogs and International Disasters

So Jo is sleeping again.  

This is a good thing — she spent much of yesterday sitting because lying down hurt, and had to be coaxed to lie down because sitting and almost-sleeping sitting up just wasn’t working, but she finally did get down and went to sleep.

And at night.

And today.

These are trying times.  As I write this Jo is healing from a severe dog bite and surgery and if that weren't bad enough,  the world seems to be going to hell.  

More than a few of those plague/disease/disaster movies seem to be coming true and, as one friend said, our alleged leaders all seem to sound like the mayor in the movie “Jaws,” always trying to tell folks that no, don’t worry, no problem, go back swimming, a few folks always disappear around here, it’s no big deal.

I sit here at home and read too much news about that crap and feel my gut tighten up, my head buzz, my eyesight go tunnel.  I worry if I’ll ever be able to buy bread flour again, or is this it?  This one bag I have hidden away is it, and then we all starve?

Which is silly.  Not gonna starve.  

I did this to myself. I mean-I’ve been on this planet for 71 years now and never once, not one day, missed a meal for lack of opportunity.  This simply is not a nation where one cannot get food somewhere if one has any means at all (which is why it is so tragic that so many do not.) 

Such a change. 

A month ago I was lazing around the house thinking, several times, that wow, this is pretty good.  The world is humming along, everyone at least in the immediate family is healthy, I had absolutely no deadlines or even horrible stresses. I was the ultimate retired guy.

That was pretty selfish thinking, now that I ponder it.  

We have two family/friends battling cancer, and one of them is pretty close to losing the fight. Climate change is making the world go weird, politics has gone insane, who am I to sit and be smugly content?

This strikes me now, even as I write it, as something out of a Greek tragedy, the unseen foreboding, the signals not paid attention to. The dumb contentedness and then — BOOM.

I was not totally at sea.  There were the tiny little voices saying “Watch out!” that are oh so easy to ignore. 

But what was I going to do … tell our broker to get all the stocks in cash at once? Buy gold? 

Panic is never wise.

Order that month supply of MREs? Tempting but then you have to eat them. Ever eat an MRE?  It helps to be really hungry.

The larder here at home is already full of staples.  Stupid to jam more in. Even if you do, as the saying goes, if everything falls apart that won’t matter and if it doesn’t fall apart, well, we’ll muddle through somehow.

It started falling apart quite suddenly, actually. Through February the stock market was on its usual helium high, stores were full. I went to SLC on March 9, a Monday— to pay my taxes.  While there I stopped off at Trader Joe’s and admired all the well-stocked shelves. Bought some stuff. Eggs. Chocolate. Coffee.

Stopped at Smiths and admired the mostly stocked shelves there. Bought some stuff. 

Tuesday I was at the eye surgery doctor’s place all morning getting my eyes examined.  With them dilated, I didn’t go anywhere else that day.

Was hearing rumbles Tuesday night. Went back to Smith’s Wednesday morning, bought more stuff — some soup, canned chili.  We didn’t need any, I bought more anyway.  We now have lots of canned chili. 

Don’t ask me why.  It’s not as if we eat that much canned chili. It’s more that I have always had this urge to be well-prepped although, get real, I’d starve in a month on my prepping skills. Or get royally sick of canned chili.

But the place was normal.  Moms with kids were pondering lunch meats and frozen foods. Nobody was sweeping stuff off shelves. I could buy all the tuna and chunky soup I wanted. I went home, ate lunch, took a nap.

That same afternoon I saw folks putting up posts on Facebook of the “Have people gone nuts?” variety. These posts were describing long lines in grocery stores and people sweeping whole displays of Hostess cupcakes into their baskets. 

I didn’t go look, but poo-pooed them.  Really? 

Actually, yeah — go figure.  And that’s the way it’s been ever since—people going mad over stuff they have never bought in bulk before.  Vicarious desperation made me feel a small twinge of victory when I found a three-pack of pocket tissues the other day — 10 tissues each! — at the local dollar store. Buying something at another market just so I can say I did — a small jar of peanut butter, some packs of bread yeast.

I don’t understand it, honestly, except from a psychological standpoint, why folks are acting nuts. I know when that happens I, too, am strongly tempted to act nuts and grab stuff I don’t really need — like 3-packs of pocket tissues. The British, I hear, are panic buying tea.  

That’s how we finished the week and weekend. Watched news stories of the virus spreading, the markets crashing.

I took Jo for a walk Tuesday.  Nice sunny day. We went through the cemetery, did the full two mile walk.  Saw some lady with two dogs, including a puppy that was all over on its leash, didn’t pay them any mind.

Then from across the field there saw the larger dog, a pit, take off and wondered why the owner was letting it run loose, but I guess it had broken loose. I saw it curve around and come at us and instead of stopping and sniffing like most dogs do it snarled/grabbed at Jo — loud yipping, I waded in and kicked it hard in the chest, then yelled at it as it backed off.

Kept walking, checked Jo, saw nothing, kept walking, lady came walking towards her dog apologize/waving and I kept going, thinking that was the end of it. 

But later Jo was limping and I found blood. Vet found a slash and bruising. Surgery.  Home with a collar.

Rough rest of the day — she had those post-operative stares where all you can do is sit and look and hope to die quietly while your body figures out what just happened.  That night I did get her to lay down in her bed in the bedroom, but at 4 a.m. she was up and I needed to take her out. Carla needed to sleep so I just took Jo’s bed out to the living room, put on clothes and went out with her.

Which was where we were at 7:09 when the earthquake hit. Good noise and rocking and rumbling, but nothing crashed down. It was a 5.7 near Magna.. Caught Ben taking a shower.  Scared the bejesus out of everyone, and like we needed a new source of stress?

Many jokes of locusts being next.

Jo had a quiet painful day yesterday.  She would move when urged, or led with a treat, and it was afternoon before I got her to lay down and sleep for a while.

  

Tending to her has been a good distraction for me — a dose of reality amid all the chaos and doom and gloom and fear.  I can stare at the news all day and all night, but there’s not a damn thing I can do about it. The world is a giant ocean and I am just a minnow — I will go where the ocean goes, powerless to do more than wave my little fins. I can think I'm making a difference, but if the ocean swell takes me 100 miles one way, my paddling only gets me back a couple feet.

But a hurting dog is real, something I can deal with, a ground point. It is someone who needs me to be there, to act, to do.  She is a family member in need.

And today — March 19, my 71st birthday — she’s a lot brighter, pretty close to normal in outlook.  Still favoring that right front leg, which also got a nasty bruise, but she is being Jo again.  This all made me realize how much I’ve grown to depend on her and how little I think of that.  

So here we are.  The world is going to hell, idiots are panic buying toilet paper, but I made it to 71 in pretty good stead.

And my dog is doing ok. She's watching for the mailman again. 

Life’s no longer that care-free fantasy I enjoyed in that bygone era of last month, but I still have very little to complain about.