Utah, "The Big Lie" and Critical Race Theory. And Davy Crockett

I have been thinking about Utah's drift to the hard right on this whole Critical Race Theory thing, with shrill fear mongering pushing reasoned discussion aside. So  I decided to write to two members of the Legislature who I thought might actually pay attention to a reasoned argument about it.

I won't name them now.  They need a chance to respond, but here's what I told them. If they answer, I will post those answers here:

I have spoken with you both in the past about the “message bills” and generally crazy/stupid things that come before the Legislature every year. We’ve always agreed that the majority of lawmakers see them for what they are and treat them accordingly. 

I am also very aware, and understanding, of the dance you have to do to quietly tolerate the people who push those things and gently nudge their silliness aside in order to get the bills through that really do matter. 

I get it, trust me on this. Your job requires some real edge work, especially when it is the leaders of the Legislature pushing the bills. 

At the same time, as I sit here trying to follow the news, I am seeing some really unnerving trends right here in Utah that make me think the time for gentle nudging is past. 

While 1619 Project/Critical Race Theory is the shiny object at the moment, what disturbes me more is the thinking behind this movement that is causing so much screaming. What I see is an opportunity being taken to attempt to legislate what history is, to control what can be taught about it and how it can be interpreted. There’s a measure of the “Big Lie” politics of the moment mixed in as well. 

That’s really, really dangerous. George Orwell’s 1984 says “He who controls the past controls the future,” and the idea of our Legislature telling teachers what history is just makes me itch.

Does that happen?  Just yesterday NPR had an interview with the author of a book called “Forget the Alamo” about Texas history. Here’s a link: https://www.npr.org/2021/06/16/1006907140/forget-the-alamo-texas-history-bryan-burrough

The author notes that Texas, by law, requires that schools teach a “heroic” version of the Battle of the Alamo. What’s that?  If you are my age you think of Fess Parker as Davy Crockett. If you are younger, you have a John Wayne movie. Both are depictions of unmitigated good vs. evil, heroic Texans vs. evil Mexicans. 

The problem with that heroic stuff is that it isn’t true.  Not even close.  While I’m uncomfortable learning that my childhood hero was really an aging, out-of-work drifter who abandoned his family and was in Texas hoping for an easy military gig to get some free land and a fresh start, I can handle it. I won’t even throw away my coon skin hat.

That the Texas land Davy Crockett fought for would be worked by slaves is also uncomfortable, but there it is. Mexico was very opposed to slavery and didn’t want slave owners taking over a chunk of Mexican territory.

(Interesting how slavery comes up so much in our history, isn’t it? Someone ought to study that.)

So there’s the truth. And yet, the law in Texas is the law. 

Here in Utah we seem to be edging along a similar path with this Critical Race Theory (CRT) thing. As I said above, I smell a bit of “Big Lie” politics in this as well.

The Legislature just passed a resolution about CRT, which is odd because the bill is aimed at a segment of our education system where CRT is not taught. Still, the people promoting that bill are making some pretty serious allegations about what CRT will do and don’t seem ready to stop pushing for more restrictions. 

Will study of race and slavery in higher education be next? I would not doubt it.

Are they a few silly folk who can be nudged aside?   One of the loudest proponents of this stuff is a United States Congressman from Utah. He wants any teacher who mentions CRT fired.  He says it will destroy society.

A US Congressman. And he’s not alone. Gov. Cox is making approving noises. The Republican Party in Utah has adopted this as a platform plank.

What’s true? 

Stuart Culver, Dean of the U of U College of Humanities, wrote a very thoughtful piece about CRT which I urge you to read if you have not already.  Here’s a link: https://humanities.utah.edu/news/deans-message-crt.php

CRT is studying history of race and slavery and and looking at how they have steered and formed our national culture and institutions over the years. This is something I, as a historian, find laudable and interesting. Will such study destroy more myths about our history than just that Alamo stuff?  Very possibly, and this will make people upset. My own research has destroyed some very fun myths about Ogden’s history and I really miss them.

One point Dean Culver makes is that the sponsors of the resolution, asked to define CRT, could not do so in an accurate manner, and I’m seeing a lot of that sort of thing out here in the world.  People are reacting to what they are told CRT is by screamers on right wing TV and radio, not what it actually is. I’m positive some lawmakers who know better are happy to use the fear that that misinformation breeds to scare people into voting for them. Tell people lies, then point to their belief of that lie as a reason to pass laws. 

You two know me. I’m trying real hard not to overreact to this stuff.  I spent an entire career in journalism trying to find truth. One thing I learned is that if nobody speaks out for the truth — if they worry about rocking the boat or losing their position for doing so — then the lies win. We saw what happens then on Jan. 6 in DC.

I am very worried that in Utah, as in so many other places, the lies are winning. 

Are they?  And if so, what are you doing about it?

Richard Stereo Catalong

 Here is the 1924 catalog from the Richard Verascope company.

Raging Kodak Retina!!!

 Had a bit of shopping therapy the other day and grabbed this little Kodak Retina 1 at the antique store.  A cool $40 but it seemed to work OK.

Did I need it? Already had two others, so this makes no sense. So what else is new?

But it's dang cute. You can see why they competed pretty well against the Leicas of their day.  This little number -- production started in the 30s, had a hiatus during WWII when the factories were building other things and then continued into the 60s -- is smaller and lighter than a Leica I, let along the rangefindered Leicas II and III they competed with.  

This is a camera that would easily fit in a pocket. So did Leicas, before they quit making collapsible lenses.

Being enormously simple in build, there is little to go wrong so this camera works very nicely.  It has no rangefinder to get out of whack.  The Compur-Rapid shutter sounds snappy. Even the slow speeds are not dragging. Nobody has been denting the struts so it opens and closes properly. Focus is a bit stiff, so I suspect the 70-year-old grease in there is dried out a bit.

But is the camera any good? Extrapolating serial number data I figure this one was made in the late 40s, making it as old as I am. 

It has an f3.5 Schneider Rexina Xenar lens, a single-coated little gem.  I've always been partial to the Xenar and its variants. For some reason whites seem to glow with these lenses.  The Schneider optics on my Rollei cameras are really sweet.

Focus is by guesstimation.  There is no rangefinder, and distance markings are in meters, but the maximum aperture of 3.5 gives good depth of field even wide-open.  Most of my shots were outdoors at f8 and 1/250 second. Plus I'm pretty good at judging distance.

To test this I loaded some Kodak Plus-X ASA 100 film, which was processed in D-76 1:1, as per normal directions.  This is a standard film this camera was made to be used with and I wanted it to be happy and feel at home. 

The results?

Really lovely. The resolution of my scanner is never great, so I am betting the prints will have even more detail.  As you can see, however, they came out really nice.

Original Kodak Six-16: Shooting the present with the past

I've spent the last couple of weeks in a delightful wander down memory lane spark-plugged by a tiny time machine.

I got it from my father. It's his camera.

Cameras are time machines.  They freeze time, sending tiny bits of it into the future.  Those bits stay with us always. They are the key to other bits, the ones locked away in memories.

In the months before Dad married Mom in 1945 they went on dates, of course, and Dad took Mom's picture because that's what you do with a pretty girl.

Mom took his, too.  Hold the camera here, look there, push this. 

And so on.

We still have those pictures. They're both smiling and happy and young although, admittedly, in one Dad's face has a quizzical look and I know he's about to say, "Uh, honey? The camera is sideways."

Dad's camera was a Kodak Six-16. I still have it and, by a miracle of chance, plus modern computer printing technology, I've returned it to use and am really impressed with what it can do. 

Mom had the
camera sideways

The bits of time it can capture now will -- if my printing holds up -- last another 80 years or so, providing memories for my own children and grandchildren.

As befits a time machine, the camera is a lovely thing: Enamel and chrome, with nice art-deco design and decorations. It has a self-erecting standard so you just pop the front open and start snapping. 

The Six-16 was introduced in 1932 and produced for two years. Kodak used it to introduce the 616 size of film, so I guess they wanted a classy start to the line. 

Since Dad was 15 in 1932, I'm going to guess he bought it later, perhaps when he was in the Army and had some money. He probably bought it used for $5 or $10 -- it was $20 new which was a good chunk of a week's wages back then. Dad used to tell me his teenage jobs during the Great Depression were 10 cents an hour type things. 

This Kodak was sold with several lens options.  Dad's has an f 6.3 Kodak Anastigmat. F 6.3 is pretty slow for a serious camera, even in 1932, so I have to wonder what market the Kodak folks were looking to attract. Well-heeled snap-shooters who want to impress folks with their stylish new camera? 

Very likely. Such a slow lens limits you to faster films, bright light and static subjects.  The top shutter speed of 100 does the same. So this is a camera that limits you to pictures of your kids standing somewhere, or shots of the Grand Canyon (as long as it holds still) and so forth.

So, yeah, well-heeled snap-shooters. No more ambitious than a Brownie Box but a lot more stylish.

But as a snap-shooter, as you will see, it does very well.  A serious photographer willing to put up with a few limitations will also find it a very usable machine. 

One of those limitations is the viewfinder, a little folding mirror/lens thing. I hate this kind of viewfinder.  It's a holdover from the finders on box cameras and I hate those too. 

That said, it works. Give it a little windage, you capture what you see, more or less. 

Dad gave me this camera in the 1980s.  The film for it had been discontinued and the bellows were shot but he hated to just toss it, and he knew I collected cameras.

I had new bellows put on it. This was pure sentiment but I felt it deserved to be in good shape. The I set it on the shelf.

Come forward 35 years or so.

616 film is half an inch wider than still-available 120 film. You can put 120 into one of these cameras, but until recently that meant a trip to the hardware store to dig around for things to make spacers that could also drive the spool that engages with the key in the camera that turns the spool that takes up the film. 

Clever people have done this but I was never that clever. The other alternative -- buying fresh 616 film from a specialty manufacturer -- was prohibitively expensive.

So the camera sat until the gods invented computers that could print solid objects. Someone said "I wonder if I can print spacers for 120 film in my old camera?" and a cottage industry of such folk sprang up. EBay has many.

I was actually looking for spacers for a Zeiss Cocarette I found at an antique shop. It uses 116 film. The guy making the spacers -- they cost $10 -- accidentally sent 616 spacers and, when informed of the error, apologized, told me to keep the 616s and sent the right ones.

I said "Hey, those will work with dad's old camera!" I tried them, liked them, and sent the guy another $10.

What's the difference? 116 film used a fatter spool that won't fit inside the smaller spaces of a 616 camera. I even have to trim the 120 spools with a fingernail clipper so they will fit. 

Because the paper backing of 120 film is not the same as 616, you have to use a different method of counting film shot numbers in the camera's red window, but there are many easy guides for this. You get six shots on a single roll of 120 film, all perfectly spaced. At 2 1/2 inches by 4 1/2 inches, they're practically what we today would call panoramic. 

Once the film problem was solved I set out on a small journey. 

Dad used this camera to preserve some of the big moments in his life and I thought it would be fun to re-shoot some of them; Take it around and do "then-and-now" pictures of some old family haunts in Salt Lake City.

This led to two surprises: How meaningful this would be, and how really cool the images would be.

As I said above, cameras capture instants of time and send them far into the future. You can visit those times and experience them.

1952

And so there I was, out front of the house I lived in in 1952, taking a picture of it with Dad's camera. The calendar says the year is 2020, but in my mind's eye I am back in 1952, or perhaps 1953, a little kid on roller skates zooming down the sidewalk and whipping a turn into the driveway of our new house. 

Or is that my brother and I on our tricycles riding down the sidewalk? Why, yes it is. Check out the cool cowboy hats. There's Dad over there taking our picture too! How cool.

Same house today

I shot the elementary schools I went to. Is it fun to relive adolescence with all its fears and angst and trauma?  Well, no, but nobody said time travel would be easy or predictable.

So around I went, snapping shots and taking notes, saying "Hi!" to the occasional ghost as it wandered by. You get used to it.

Back home in the darkroom I had another surprise of a very pleasant sort: The amazing quality of the images I was getting. This Kodak doesn't have a wiz-bang multi-coated Zeiss or Leica lens, after all.  This is a consumer-grade Kodak.

The Kodak Anastigmat on this is a Cooke triplet -- a three-element lens design invented in the late 19th century. It is not as sophisticated a the Zeiss Tessar formula and is cheaper to manufacture.

Downtown Salt Lake
today or 1952?

 

As I said above: This camera was aimed at snap-shooters who wanted to look cool. Most snaps back then were processed as contact prints by the local drug store, so even mediocre lenses give pretty acceptable results. The negatives from this -- 2 1/2 inches by 4 1/2 inches, are big enough to make a very acceptable contact print to put into the family album. 

But, if anyone bothered to have any of their negatives from this camera enlarged -- wow.

I've been shooting both Fuji Acros 100 and Ilford HP5-plus.  The faster Ilford gives me a little more leeway in dimmer situations. Without a tripod you really don't want to use a lower shutter speed than 1/50, and that only carefully. The top speed is 1/100, but the lens goes down to f-32, so bright light isn't a problem. Being sorta-large format, grain isn't a problem with any film.

At a maximum aperture of f6.3, it's a slow lens. I suspect Kodak knew if it went wider it would need a more expensive Tessar design lens to hold quality. A Cooke triplet does really great at smaller lens openings. Heck, so does every other lens ever made. Small aperture also helps with the guess-distance focus system of this.

Flaring is a problem.  The lens is pre-war uncoated. All of Kodak's "How To Take Better Pictures" books tell snap-shooters to take pictures outdoors with the sun behind them, which naturally shades the camera. I did this as much as possible, but there were situations where that wasn't best and in those I had to shade the camera's lens as well as I could with a hand.

Which sometimes worked, sometimes not.

When it did, as I said, the results were really great.  Pictures taken in open shade also came out great. It was fun to play with the really long negative format, too.

Downtown SLC

The big surprise was making 8 by 10 inch prints. Negatives from uncoated lenses aren't usually as snappy as those from coated lenses, but the prints an be amazing, and these are.

Even blown up, they're super-sharp, nice and crisp and contrasty. I'd put these against anything shot with a modern camera.

Print from Kodak Six-16 negative

 

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.