sonora2sonoma

Four days from now, October 25, will mark the 105^th anniversary of the day my maternal grandfather, John Albert Cartwright, perished from the Spanish flu. I remember my grandmother telling me that one third of the population of the small town in Utah where they lived back then didn’t survive the pandemic surging across the nation at that time. His passing, like those of many others, had far reaching implications for his family that led my grandmother to eventually relocate to California, providing my mother the opportunity to meet a California boy who eventually became my father.

The story of my family’s experience with the Spanish flu, and my grandfather’s death as a result of it, left an indelible impression on me as a child and made me forever wary, in a deeply personal way, of the dangers of global pandemics.

Interestingly, the president, too, had a grandfather who didn’t survive that pandemic, passing on May 30, 1918 in the first wave of the pandemic. His grandfather, Friedrich Trump (possibly Drumpf), according to a March 7, 2020 Washington Post article, “came home from a stroll one day in May feeling sick (and) died almost immediately.” The president’s father, Fred, was only 12 when his father perished. It is inconceivable that the young donald didn’t possess some knowledge of what must have been a singularly significant event in his immediate family history.  

Yet what the president made of that familial tie to the tragedy of losing a close family member to a virulent disease was, apparently, much different than that of other, more vigilant observers. The president was quoted in that same Washington Post edition of March 7, 2020 as having said “Does anybody die from the flu? I didn’t know people died from the flu.”

Is this man a bold-faced liar, or is he incredibly obtuse? More likely, he is both. In any event, it has become painfully obvious, to our peril, that he is incapable of learning from experience.

Ironically, Friedrich Trump came to the US from Germany at age 16 as an “unaccompanied alien child.” This didn’t, apparently, constitute sufficient cause for the president to reconsider his actions in his treatment of unaccompanied minors from Central America seeking to enter the country.  

Also of interest, the trump patriarch was stripped of his Bavarian citizenship for not fulfilling the mandatory military service required of young men his age, thus setting the stage for a trump family tradition of dodging military service that has continued through mr trump and beyond, to his progeny.

This may go some way toward explaining the president’s disparagement of those who serve in the military, since he has had “no personal experience to learn from and appreciate military sacrifice.” http://www.nowaytrump.com/?p=427

But then, as noted above, he appears incapable of learning from experience anyway, so his lack of the personal experience from which he might have broadened his horizons is rendered moot.

As is any conjecture that a family history of loss due to the ravages of a pandemic constitutes reason to believe this man could develop a deeper understanding of and appreciation for the dangers of communicable diseases and the toll they take on their victims.

Not even a personal encounter with Covid itself, it seems, was capable of achieving that.

Tim Konrad

October 20, 2020