Following Instructions

THE FACEBOOK cartoon featured a picture of a square flat pizza box, the sort we all know and love when it arrives at our front door just before a hungry kickoff. On its flap was stenciled: "Remove pizza from box before eating." Below the cartoon someone had typed in; "We're not gonna make it as a species, are we"? Indeed it was enough to make you wonder, and it made me think, trying to decide whether I should laugh, cry, or both. the governor of Florida spoke today, and said: "This climate change stuff has been 'politicized'. I just want to do what's bets for Floridians." Florida is already and will in the future experience the worst consequences of human made climate change: sever droughts, severe heat, coastal regions submerged beneath ever rising water, killer hurricanes of increasing frequency. Precisely whom does the Republican governor think has "politicized" climate change if not folks like him, Republicans who deny its existence rather than acknowledge it and help fight it?  And what does it matter if idiots 'politicize" climate change as long as everyone accepts its reality and helps mitigate it? since solutions to climate involve public policy, well, of course it is "politicized, because it is a public, political concern. Remove the pizza, governor. First, we need to get everyone vaccinated. All of us. If everyo I had in my hand a very large circular sandwich of some sort, a gyrne in the U.S. A. gets vaccinated, the Covid 19 epidemic ends. If everyone in the world gets vaccinated, the pandemic ends, just like polio and small pox, chicken pox, and shingles. Our anti-vaxxing friends might do well to notice that more than one hundred and fifty million Americans have been vaccinated, and that they are all doing just fine. They have removed the pizza from the box before eating it. That tells us something, correct? If only half the country vaccinates, the pandemic will go on about its business, killing hundreds of thousands more people, in half the country. About forty years ago I was hanging out on the south end of Battery Park, gazing relaxedly out at the water and Lady  Liberty. I had in my hands a very large circular sandwich of some sort, one of those new York gyros, on a thin circular paper plated exactly the same shape and size as the sandwich. Absent mindedly, contentedly I munched. Suddenly I realized that I was eating the plate along with the sandwich.both were half gone. i was shocked and horrified. My sister couldn't stop laughing. So maybe I do need to read the instructions on the pizza box. The paper neither made me sick, nor even upset my stomach. Maybe we have a chance after all. Then again, maybe we don't.