Goodbye To All That

I have, as a general rule, enjoyed decadal years. My first, 1960, was a good year, even though I was in school, and no longer had the freedom of a child. It was an exciting time: we were poised to go into space, and the grandparents in the White House would soon be replaced with someone much younger, whether Nixon or Kennedy. The year 1970 was another excellent year. We had landed on the moon the previous year, and it was clear that we (as a country) could do anything we wished, except, perhaps, to extricate ourselves from Vietnam. I began that year as a high school junior (the best year of high school, in my opinion) and ended the year as a senior.

The decadal year of 1980 was a year of hope. The preceding year saw the return of gasoline lines, the Iranian hostage situation, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Things must surely get better in the new year. Things did eventually get better, and I believe the year 1980 marked the beginning of the turn-around. In 1990, we finally sold our home in Virginia, and the family joined me in Georgia, where we bought a new home, enrolled the kiddies in their new schools, and began our tenure as Georgians. I have lived in Georgia since moving here to take a job, in 1989, and have lived here longer than I have lived in any of the four states that have served as my permanent residences.

Which brings us to Y2K, the funkiest of the decadal years. The world did not end with the beginning of the new millenium, and life was very good, at least for a year. Then the 9/11 terrorist attack occurred, and the world changed. The year 2010 was not bad at all. I had moved to Madison, Georgia, back in 2005, and the good life here in the non-metropolitan area of Georgia was blissful.

Which brings us to 2020, and the pandemic.

The worst aspect of the year 2020 was not the virus released in the Wuhan region of China. Yes, the Wuhan Flu has been deadly, though not, perhaps, as deadly as the numbers indicate. (I recently saw an interview with a medical examiner in Michigan, I think it was, who was quite upset when she learned that the corpse on her table with the three gunshot wounds, one of which was fatal, was listed as a Covid-19 death.) But people die all the time, with or without the Wuhan Flu.

I checked the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website a moment ago. According to the CDC, there have been 337,419 deaths from the coronavirus in this country. I checked on the cancer statistics, also using a link on the CDC website, which directed me to the National Cancer Institute’s website. This year there were a total of 606,520 fatalities related to cancer. The number of deaths from cancer this year is 1.8 times the number of Wuhan Flu deaths. A similar fact holds for heart disease: according to the CDC website, “About 655,000 Americans die from heart disease each year – that’s 1 in every 4 deaths.” So the number of deaths from heart disease is nearly twice the number of deaths from the Wuhan Flu.

Yes, the Wuhan Flu is deadly, and every death associated with it is a tragedy. But it isn’t the deadliest disease facing us today. It has assumed such prominence in our thinking because it has been endlessly hyped by a media that apparently finds little else interesting to report on.

Which brings us to the worst aspect of the year 2020. Because of the hype, because of the fear generated by those who report on the disease, we have voluntarily given up many of our freedoms. Governors impose lockdowns, destroying jobs, and lives, while they go about their business as if nothing has happened. People who resist are harrassed, charged, and jailed. Yet others are allowed to congregate in mobs, if the leadership of the state, or city, agrees with the mob’s objectives. It is an arbitrary and capricious rule, not by law, but by fallible humans. It is not a republican form of government, which means that it is unconstitutional. Yet we put up with it.

A friend sent a funny meme to me It was a picture of the comedian Jeff Foxworthy, whose shtick is “You may be a redneck if . . .” The caption said: “If your Democrat governor killed your small business, and you still support that same governor because you hate Donald Trump, you ain’t a redneck, because rednecks ain’t that stupid.”

If you are willing to submit to these anti-constitutional governors, I can only hope that your chains rest lightly on you.

There is some hope. I will leave you with an observation by the journalist Salena Zito. “Americans need something to aspire to — a purpose or someone who will take us to a better place. If 2020 taught us anything, it taught us that that journey upward will not come from a politician, nor will it come from the loudest voices, which means it will likely come from within us as a people. That might be the best news for 2021.”

Happy new year, everyone!