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I heard a story on the radio yesterday morning about a woman who said she isn’t taking her sick children to gatherings these days because of the coronavirus; she said she didn’t want to “freak people out” when they noticed her kids exhibiting signs of illness. This illustrates the lack of awareness many people demonstrate concerning the transmissibility of viruses and other pathogens. If this woman understood that exposing people to her sick children might help them spread whatever pathogen they’re carrying to others, she would hopefully think twice about doing so.

When I was still working for a government human services agency a few years ago fellow co-workers would often come to work sick despite signs on the bathroom walls advising them to stay home if they were symptomatic. To my co-workers’ credit, the workload in our department was so onerous that missing work meant falling hopelessly behind. Nonetheless, their behavior demonstrated the same lack of awareness as the woman mentioned above.

This lack of concern was evident at an art show reception my wife and I attended this past weekend; everyone wanted to either hug or shake hands.  When I responded with an elbow bump, my gesture was met by some with amusement.

Yesterday I went to see a local chiropractor whose incautious attitude toward the coronavirus’s transmissibility was aptly demonstrated. When I asked him what precautions he was taking to protect his patients from infection, my request was met with skepticism and mild annoyance at his having to wipe down the area of the face cradle not covered by the rolled paper masking. I got the feeling the doctor thought, for whatever reason, that my request was unreasonable.

The failure of people working in the health care sector to follow a proper hygiene regimen, especially during an epidemic, is surprising and alarming: The public’s confusion over how to maintain social distancing is less surprising, considering the mixed messaging on the subject currently emanating from the White House. In the words of Nicholas Kristof, writing in the yesterday’s New York Times, “at least Emperor Nero supposedly only fiddled while Rome burned; he didn’t tell the Romans that the fire was no big deal.”

The conflicting messaging vis a vis trump’s reality defying utterances only serves to add to the confusion already present because of the dearth of meaningful information the government has provided so far.

The failure of the trump administration to secure adequate numbers of test kits has created a situation in which we are forced to play Chinese Roulette with our lives. Because of the government’s inability to test those who have been exposed, we have no idea the actual extent or spread of the virus. That means unknown numbers of people who may have been exposed may be unwittingly spreading the contagion to others without any means of tracking its spread.

If the epidemic spreads like many predictions indicate, the president will, in effect, be guilty of manslaughter on a large scale, as will his accomplices in the Senate who failed, when they had the opportunity, to remove this menace from office.

Were the Founding Fathers to somehow see the tragedy unfolding today in the nation’s capital, they would be extremely skeptical over the odds their great experiment in self-government will endure.

Tim Konrad

A person’s perspective in life is built upon a foundation of interests; meaning is derived based on how those interests are affected by what transpires. How one interprets the events that transpire during the course of one’s days determines one’s actions—how one responds to the circumstances with which one is confronted: A generous outlook will elicit a generous response, while a selfish one will result in selfish actions. A person’s actions will reveal their true intentions to anyone paying attention. Outward acts mirror inward inclinations—garbage in, garbage out, and so forth.

A persons words, while they may be revelatory of the quality of their inner workings—the purity of their intentions—may also, if their intentions are impure and their motives less than honorable, be false and misleading, designed to deceive others in line with whatever purpose motivates their mendacity.

When someone’s words correspond with their actions, we perceive them as being truthful; when those actions are in disharmony with their utterances, we conclude, if we are conscious of the discrepancy, that they are being dishonest.

When a person’s words repeatedly fail to correspond with their actions, yet they forcefully maintain their insistence that they are speaking truthfully, the normal response of those in observance is to conclude that person has lost all credibility. Parables such as the one about the little boy who cried wolf were designed to illustrate this phenomenon.

The unabashed deceitfulness of the current president of the United States would seem to fly in the face of this logic. This man’s practice of repeating his lies ad infinitum despite documented evidence of the falsehood of his assertions, rather than eliciting doubt and incredulity among his followers, fortifies their belief in the purity of his intent and cements their adherence to his cause.

It would seem the president believes that, by repeating his lies often enough and persisting in doing so over time, they eventually assume an aura of truth by virtue of their constant and repeated recitation. But, while the constant repetition of a mantra is said to lead the devotee to higher realms of understanding, the president’s incessant uttering of falsehoods instead leads the listener/follower to deeper depths of deception. Which is precisely his intention.

The ability to turn logic on its head and twist facts in support of nefarious ends is not limited to the president alone; the vice president did so as recently as the other day when he sought to rationalize the politicization of the Corona epidemic by the president’s witless son, among other, by citing one similarly inappropriate remark made by an opponent in an editorial as justification for their outrageously inappropriate responses. An eye for an eye renders everyone blind, as they say, yet, after millennia of eye-plucking, the wisdom of that message remains beyond the ken of far too many people.

Future volumes will be written about the trump phenomena; parallels will be drawn between his and Adolf Hitler’s rise and eventual fall. Will those who follow us be any more successful than we’ve been so far in applying the lessons history has to offer? Minus some great, world-wide awakening of consciousness, given what is known about human nature, the odds aren’t all that promising.

Yet, we must hope, for minus hope, the answer will most assuredly be “Nope.”

Tim Konrad

Lately I’ve been experiencing shortness of breath—a symptom of anxiety like one I had as a child. Our family doctor had an EKG run on me at the time to rule out any heart-related issues. The test results were negative, and no other physical reason was offered to account for my condition. Back in the 50s, the prevailing belief among health care professionals was that children were not subject to the kinds of emotional disturbances experienced by adults; their diagnosis became that my symptoms had been a product of my imagination. Despite that diagnosis, I came to realize, years later, that I had indeed been suffering from depression as a child, and that my shortness of breath had been a manifestation of that condition.

The past couple of days I’ve again been experiencing shortness of breath like that experienced in my childhood. My doctor checked me and didn’t seem concerned.  After briefly surveying the possible causes, I’ve concluded the likely suspect is the angst-producing tenor of the daily dribble of dreadful news emanating from the nation’s capital. Although the overall effect of this onslaught is mind-numbing in a broader sense, the spikes produced by certain travesty-trumping developments, now occurring with greater frequency, elevate my anxiety level beyond my now normal-seeming state of distress.

I further suspect my faithful devotion to following the developing drama on MSNBC may serve to exacerbate the already present tension enveloping this news. Even if you discount the sometimes hyperbolic-seeming statements voiced by its moderators, the interviews featured on the show’s programming –with scholars, historians and well-informed former congressional representatives the likes of Jon Meacham, Lawrence Tribe, Mike McFall and Claire McCaskill—still retain the ability to trigger my fight or flight response, with its attendant negative side effects on not only my physiology but also my emotional well-being. In that regard, the sense of fear that comes with the programming is not dissimilar to that contained in the propagandistic rubbish being dished out on Fox. The mere fact I feel exhausted after hours of focusing on the information disseminated on these programs should have served to remind me that listening to such programming has its own peril.

Yesterday, feeling spent and in need of some diversion to distract me from my angst, I decided to “tune out” and change channels, devoting a sizeable portion of the afternoon to watching Star Trek: Discovery on CBS All Access. The irony of finding relief from the news of the nation in watching Klingons talk of eating their enemies was not lost on me.

We on the “Left Coast” should not lose sight of the fact that we reside in a bubble—that our views, no matter how correct they seem to us—are not shared by much of the rest of the country. To pin our hopes on folks awakening from the fog of propaganda being proffered by the likes of Fox Views is to court disaster. And we should also be aware that, when it comes to bias, MSNBC is no more immune than those other outlets with whose views we disagree.

It’s becoming increasingly difficult to observe the dismantling of our governmental institutions without running the real risk of burnout, but that is exactly what trump and his minions wish for us to do. Minus the opposition of those who find his actions deplorable, the president would finally be freed from any restraints whatsoever. In that respect, the citizenry is our last defense. In seeking distraction by watching Scfi, or whatever other diversion seems appealing, we might as well signal our surrender and resign ourselves to our fates.

So, I find myself having to choose between the twin perils of maintaining my vigil, with its attendant emotional and physiological consequences, and tuning out, with its ominous socio-political ramifications—a Catch 22 of the first order!

Tim Konrad