Burning Out, But Keeping Hope Alive

CONTAGION SPREADS MULTIPLICATIVELY, two becomes four, then eight, sixteen, thirty two, sixty four, and soon the numbers become hugs. Finally, everyone is either fully recovered or dead, the fire is exhausted, the wildfire burned out, like the bubonic plague of the fourteenth and seventeenth centurie. That's why social distancing works; it breaks the chains of contagion. The Americans are more like the Italians than the chinese: unaccustomed and adverse to self imposed discipline, much more so to discipline imposed externally. The Chinese broke the chain, the italians did not. Indeed, there are advantages to living in an authoritarian country. Republicans, conservative by nature, embrace tradition and fear change. Predictably, they downplay the severity of the virus. Democrats, liberal and progressive, react to the existing world with anger, and seek change. They much more readily accept the reality of an epidemic which forces fundamental personal and societal change. Republicans, generally, being bound to tradition, resist accepting the reality and severity of threats like Covid 19 and climate change, because to acknowledge them requires the need to acknowledge the need for fundamental societal change, economically, politically. Democrats,always eager for tangible reasons to justify their anger with existing institutions and traditions, readily, even eagerly accept the threat of impending doom. How can we possibly ever see the world other than through our own eyes? I, and I suspect the rest of the world, am holding up surprisingly well in the absence of entertainment, especially sports. Being without march madness seems no worse than as if I were simply too busy to pay much attention to it. Now, we can all forever believe that our favorite college basketball team would have won it all. And who needs spring training? I have convinced myself that some fine day the first pitch eill be pitched, the season will finally begin, and my beloved Yankees will win the World Series, even if it takes them until Christmas to do it, and even if the Astros try to steal their signals.