Round 3

To say my academic record in high school was undistinguished is like saying the Washington Football Team could be better. I epitomized the rebellious stoner, straight out of the movie Dazed and Confused, but far less interested (and interesting!) than the most stereotypical of the film’s characters. My central purpose while attending high school was not to attend, and when I was in class my teachers wished I wasn’t. How much? This much….

I had a geometry teacher my junior or senior year – four decades blurs personal chronologies – who was a wonderful guy. Funny, thoughtful, passionate about his subject, “Mr. Jones” was generally liked and respected by his students. In other words, he didn’t deserve having me in one of his classes. Truth is I liked him quite a bit myself; it was the subject I found impossible to embrace and impelled me to often seek distraction, which he quite understandably took issue with.

Finally, after so many unexcused absence reports, and trips to the vice principal’s office, as well as countless comedy routines between us the class enjoyed, even as the lesson plan suffered, Mr. Jones asked me to stop by his classroom one afternoon to talk about things. I don’t remember many of the conversation’s details other than the offer he made me: if I never came to class again, instead signing in at the school’s math lab every day, after which I was free to “do what it is you all do,” he would give me a C each grading period for the duration of the year. I remember first asking if he was joking; he wasn’t smiling. I recall a pang of shame as I realized a teacher was risking some degree of professional consequence for no other purpose than to exclude me from his life.

Even as I accepted the offer, I wasn’t sure if it was a test, or some sort of ploy to motivate me to take things more seriously, perhaps produce an epiphany about how deleterious my attitude was. Turns out it was only what Mr. Jones said it was. And so I ended up with a free hour after lunch and Cs for the remainder of the year. Looking back it’s yet another sad portion of my teenaged indifference to most things constructive, as well as a cautionary tale about otherwise good teachers giving up on kids who are giving up on themselves. Mr. Jones surely rationalized his bargain with the proposition I was costing my classmates their teacher’s focus, robbing them of his best efforts as he was forced to devote teaching time to the discipline of a selfish brat, unconcerned with anything or anyone but his own amusement. Tough to argue with that. Most reading this surely wouldn’t.

The story is appropriate here as America heads into winter registering close to 70K new cases of Covid-19 per day, with the virus now surging in 75% of the country. We are actually in a worse situation than back in March when we shut the country down, only now we appear to believe it’s a problem we can live with, although near a quarter million of us have done just the opposite. Half a million deaths by the one-year anniversary of the pandemic is now more likely than not. Incredibly, to say there is no White House policy is far too charitable; Trump wants his people to stop talking about it. Herd immunity, whatever that is other than pretending Coronavirus is the flu, will deliver us until a vaccine comes to the rescue, so hisses Trump at his daily superspreader events.

Like my teenaged ignorance in geometry class, our President grasps only Covidiocy with no interest or patience for any incarnation of thoughtful rigor. And now he’s fully acting out on his disdain for the subject. Whatever Trump experienced during his own bout with the virus, any epiphany that may have resulted was quickly consumed by steroidal and antibiotic side effects that seemed to only accentuate already prevalent psychotic mania. It’s fair to ask when the President will start exhorting Americans not to let Coronavirus symptoms keep them from being productive. Man up and down some DayQuil, we’ve got a miracle economic recovery to get after. Would anything really surprise? Of course the obscenity is how many are fully on board with the messaging, proudly displaying their own wretched selfishness. MAGA’s version of personal liberty.

When I discovered Facebook ten years ago it was a revelation. The ability to suddenly find friends and acquaintances I hadn’t even thought of in years was intoxicating and made the world seem significantly smaller and more manageable, less transient. I remember a friend, who having discovered the platform perhaps a year earlier, assure me the novelty would wear off with the realization that there was a reason I had forgotten about many of those I now exalted about reconnecting with. At the time the observation seemed preposterously cynical, these days less so.

Turns out, as Facebook and Instagram clarify every day, our leaderless nation has become divided into those with sensibilities similar to Mr. Jones and a bunch of selfish brats. The scolds and the scolded, who really couldn’t care less. Whether it was happy hours in Florida bars back in mid-April or weddings down in Texas just last week, FB has reliably documented the historic failure of America’s response to Covid-19. It strikes me that, 30 years from now, if the worst you were touched by this pandemic is your daughter couldn’t have the wedding you both dreamed of, or your son’s basketball season was canceled, well, you got pretty damn lucky. Of course, too many don’t see it that way.

Honestly, it would be nice if one could credibly argue I was simply creating a straw man to make a broader point. Were one to put aside the wretched core, who flock maskless to Trump rallies, or even the 460K bikers who couldn’t put off Sturgis for one year, to convincingly maintain I am off base about others would be refreshing. I’m not, and a typical weekend now bears that out.

On Friday morning I went to my credit union to deposit a check. My teller was a lovely middle-aged woman named Veronica. Things were slow so we had a pleasant conversation. Masked up I asked if she and hers were staying safe? From behind the plastic partition she sadly revealed her 91-year old mother from the Chicago area had recently passed from Covid. A bit taken aback I expressed my sympathies and, lamely, clumsily, asked if she had been ailing before the virus infected her. No, answered Veronica with resignation, apparently her mother was a marvel of health and mental acuity…. until Covid got her. That night Judy Woodruff of the PBS News Hour, which Trump and his nihilists have branded the very epitome of “fake news,” closed out the broadcast with a now customary glimpse of five wonderful lives cut short by Covid-19. It was easy to imagine Veronica’s mother included as one of them. I felt enraged.

On Sunday evening another very lovely middle-aged woman I have known and admired since I required a comb and hair conditioner posted some recently snapped pictures on Facebook. Beautiful as ever, she was lined up with half a dozen of her equally pretty besties, capturing for posterity their attendance at a wedding of one of their children. Behind them a maskless band was playing, to the left a long table of other participants enjoying each other’s company within obscenely cozy confines… again, not a mask to be seen, not a concern exhibited. It could have been a picture from 2019; in fact, I checked hard to make certain it wasn’t a “memory” instead of yesterday. It was definitely the latter. The comments section of her group shot was filled to the brim with compliments like “looking good ladies” or “beautiful group” etc. I stifled the urge to send something along the lines of… “Covid, shmovid, I suppose,” which probably would have earned a block/unfriend response. Yet and still, the temptation was stronger than I wished it was; disgusted was the only way to feel, particularly with Veronica’s look of resigned sadness still a fresh image.

Four years of MAGA has come to this. We now are anything but an exceptional nation, instead defined by an ugly dichotomy of people who care and people who don’t, with the POTUS actually basing his entire re-election message on the latter group’s disdain for decency and civic virtue at precisely the moment we need them most. Make no mistake, the idea a revived economy by definition requires accepting Covid’s worst is a notion only an enemy of America could conjure. That too many we each know now nestle behind such sedition to justify their refusal to sacrifice most anything at all, even as 220K perish, is much more than simple carelessness to be scolded; it is grotesque recklessness to be condemned. How that reconfigures our friends lists is just another metric of the descent responsible for the national shame our abject failure to confront Coronavirus deserves. BC