Getting the Flu No More

IN 1991 I HAD what I presumed to be the flu for the third time in my life. I was so miserable I resolved to never have it again. That, and no auto accidents,became my two rules of catastrophic avoidance. So far, so good, knock on wood, as we say. With advancing age, I add more rules to live by: no borken legs or sprained ankles on my own doorstep, things of that nature. No amount of booster shots can persuade me to go among the unvaccinated. I mask up, avoid Monday morning gospel singing till further notice, and stay home a lot. I have my cats, my books, and my treadmill. My masks I have upgraded to M95s, or whatever the designation is. Eagerly I await anti Covid shot number four, and beyond. Meanwhile, America's remaining forty million odd unvaccinated seem more determined than ever to risk spreading what is to them a harmless virus while contributing, nay, causing new forms of it to mutate, the new forms increasingly contagious. Anti-vaccination lunacy, like superstitious religious nonsense and lunatic conspiracy theories involving pedophiles in Pizza parlors, originate on both ends of the political spectrum, but are far, far more common, and proliferate far more freelly on the far fringe right. And this, far right lunatic thinking, is the true enemy, the only pervasive enemy, the source of most if not all our troubles and societal turmoil. The late great Carl Sagan wrote a book titled "Our Demon Haunted World", whose cntral thesis is that people go astray when good, solid, fact based thinking is supplanted by fantastical, unreasoning thinking for purposes of perceived personal gain. Well, duh. No harm in stating the obvious, I suppose, and even less harm in pinpointing the source of nonsense; the far right, aka, most American conservatism. History hath shown that most folks prefer to avoid reality by escaping it, escaping into fantasies of their own making, such as religion and support for liars like, say, Donald Trump. Reality is seldom as desirable as our fanciful self delusions. The election was stolen, and what not. Hence, our universal human addiction to drugs, which infects every culture save those which threaten death for drug use. In the early twenty first century, we humans know more about the true universe than ever, having accumulated a massive body of proof concerning its true nature. And yet, religious superstition of all kind persists, like a lingering illness, or crutch. And so it is with anti-vaccination nonsense. About one third of the American people openly embrace the fantasy that the cure is more harmful than the cause. Generally, the fantisizers who cling to their fantasy that the election was stolen from Trump are the same ones who most fervantly believe in amaginary gods and holy books, who deny science, and embrace anti-vaccination idiocy. Nearly one million Americans have died from covid 19; the purveryors of nonsense persist. Our only hope and comfort is that there yet remain people who prefer to think, speak, and act intelligently amid the morass of misinformation. In 1968, while in eighth grade, on Christmas eve, I was sick with the flu. I watched on my sick-couch as an Apollo spacecraft orbited the moon, six months before another one would land on it. It made me feel better. It began my recovery from teh flu. Christmas morning, as I began to open presents, I suddenly felt much, much better; I had magically recovered from the flu, by the divine intervention of my youthful materialistic greed. The mind is amenable to disparate external inflluences. Mind, as the Dhammapada begins, foreruns all conditions. Sometimes, the minds assists us in surviving harsh realilty. To maintain sense and sanity, the mind must discipline itself.