I’m Not Leaving America

A lot of folks are thinking about leaving America for better places. This season, many Americans are dissatisfied with our response to the pandemic, the state of our society and culture. America in general.

I’m staying. Here’s why.

America is special to me, but not because we don’t make mistakes. We have made many mistakes, poor decisions, and we never quite agree on anything. Yet we are the wealthiest nation on earth because we also continuously correct ourselves and discover solutions to our problems.

We are no longer a new nation. America has been a constitutional democracy for centuries. We hear that American democracy is under attack today, but democracy is always under attack from all sides: right, left, and center.

Always. If you think not, you haven’t paid attention. Take heart, you’re not alone. Even historians have a bit of rose tint in their glasses. In this country, standard histories tend to gloss over attacks on democracy. If you disbelieve, go to the newspaper archives and see for yourself what folks were thinking about Hitler in the late 1930s. The 3rd Reich had its American backers. And it’s not only American democracy under attack. One way of reading Thucydides, the Greek historian of the 5th century BCE, is as an analysis of attacks on Athenian democracy.

The losing side in every American election, from high school class president to U.S. president, claims the election was defective. Republicans thought so in 2020, Democrats in 2016, and on down the line. No one likes to lose, so we come up with reasons, any reason we can latch onto: voter fraud, door-belling the wrong neighborhood, the electoral college, gerrymandering, hanging chads, lying politicians, external conditions like the weather, pandemics, or foreign wars. Some excuses have some truth, others not.

More than anything else, they’re excuses.

When I was a software developer, I always tried to build self-correcting systems that made seriously bad choices and errors so obvious, so blatant, they were immediately corrected.

American democracy is a self-correcting system. That’s the secret to our success. Over and over, things go sideways, millions of eyes focus on the issue, and we work it out in the fervid and contradictory jumble of thought and effort that is our society. Americans disagree with each other, but our freedom to investigate and think for ourselves coupled with our election process always favors effective solutions.

Solutions in a free society are not cheap or easy. Among a free people, you are free to say that things are bad, say something nasty, say what people want to hear. No matter how false or outrageous your statements, you’ll get attention and some people will believe you. There’s money to be made. Unscrupulous folks take advantage of this and always have, but in America, people decide for themselves and solutions that work eventually appear. The attention-getting phantasms fade away, but until they fade, they are often viciously destructive.

This is not the first tough time for the U.S. A civil war, two world wars, the Great Depression of the 1930s, the forgotten economic crises of the 19th century were all tough. The 1918 flu pandemic was a killer. Many of us once believed owning other humans was morally right. These tough times were addressed with new ideas and solutions that rose to the top from the chaos of a free people.

America’s 2021 is not easy. Nearly 800,000 dead in less than 2 years— more than the population of Seattle or Denver, more than the U.S. combat deaths in all the wars in the 20th and 21st centuries. Cherishing our freedom, many more of us have died than in autocratic states with more draconian mandates.

The pandemic has generated difficult economic issues, which, like covid-19, no one has seen before or anticipated.

Who thought a disease that kills mostly the old and sick would lead to a truck driver shortage? Labor shortages may have been predictable, but who predicted the Great Resignation?

We haven’t found the American solution to the pandemic yet. Mandatory lock-downs, masks, and vaccinations have worked in China. Their pandemic death rate is minuscule and their economy is nearly fully recovered. But the solution is not to double down on methods that clearly have not worked here. Instead, we have to find the American solution.

Now, the world faces the Omicron variant. No one knows if it will fizzle away or rage like the Delta variant, but all the experts say that variants will continue to appear and every variant has the potential to evade the vaccines and kill more.

More medicines, faster easier testing, ideas no one has noticed yet, all may be part of our solution.

We will find the American solution. It will not be autocracy or abandoning our freedom. If any entity can tackle this challenge, it’s the United States of America.

Why I Am Vaccinated and Wear a Mask

I want this pandemic to end. With approaching 700,000 US dead, lives are ripped apart, I lose sleep fretting. Angry folks lash out. I don’t blame them.

I was raised in a Christian community. My family on one side is Dutch Reformed Calvinist. On the other, German Lutheran. They argued, although, as I see them now, they agreed on much more than they disagreed. Me, I’m a perennial student. I’ve read tons of theology and history from and about past centuries.

All this study has given me a desire to treat my neighbors as I want them to treat me. I could’ve learned that from a ham-handed educational film on the Golden Rule that the teachers exhibited every year or so to stuffy darkened rooms of whispering and restless grade-schoolers at North Bellingham Elementary School. I would’ve saved myself years of time and trouble if I’d paid attention.

I’ve read enough Covid-19 research literature to see that the doctors and scientists are still struggling to learn to mitigate or end the pandemic. The best recommendations today may change tomorrow.

I’m not a scientist or a physician. There’s nothing I can do in that line. If I had my life to live over, I might become an epidemiologist or a biochemist. But I’m seventy-two years old. Fat chance of change now.

I’m one person without expertise or power. I cannot change the course of the disease or the economy.

All medicines have risks, but the risk of vaccination today is tiny compared it to the pain and chaos around me. I’m brave enough for that.

Masking is ugly and uncomfortable, but it slowed the 1918 flu pandemic and has slowed Covid-19 in places where it is practiced.

It all boils down to how I want to treat others and others to treat me. I want everyone to do what they can to end the pandemic. Will a jab in my the arm and mask end the pandemic? Of course not. But the jab and mask are the two things I can do.

That’s why I’m vaccinated and wear a mask.

Spring 2021: Perks You Up Like A Wooden Hairbrush To Your Bottom

Yeah! It’s spring folks.

20 March 2121, will be the first day of spring, but the season of renewal has already arrived for me.

On the second day of spring, I will receive my second covid-19 vaccine injection. Two weeks from then, the CDC says I can safely visit with small groups of other vaccinated people without a mask, indoors, no social distancing required. That’s the CDC rule, but my mood began to change a week after the first injection of the Moderna vaccine.

Yet to be verified but plausible reports say a single vaccination confers substantial protection. I’m sure those reports are in the back of my mind, but we have also had long sun breaks for the last few weeks in Whatcom County, and they too have touched my mood. With the sunshine, I’ve ridden over a hundred miles on my bicycle so far in March, which has done a lot to relieve the crotchets in my arthritic joints and equally age damaged psyche.

When I was a kid, we called this February Spring. It’s a comic act the climate pulls in the Northwest towards the end of February or the beginning of March. The rain stops, the skies clear, a little warm air blows in from Hawaii, dusk quits cramping the afternoon down to not much more than a coffee break, and we get a few days’ reprieve from sullen clouds and soaking drizzle. The baseball mitts come out for playing catch, and maybe an hour or two of workup baseball, or scrub, if that’s what you call it.

One year, to my mother’s chagrin, I grabbed a pair of her sewing shears and converted my jeans to cut-offs on the second or third day of February Spring. My mother and mother nature both pulled the skids out from under that. The next day was the first day of forty days of continuous showers, rain, and drizzle: all the cold damp magic that a marine climate can cast over the land. If it hadn’t been for a few whacks to my bottom with the backside of my mother’s wooden hair brush warming me up, it would have been uncomfortably cold.

But, somehow, I think this spring is different. I know. Nature has fooled me many times before and she sure can fool me again, but I don’t recall a February Spring lasting past the Ides of March like this year. The Indian Plum is blooming, the hazelnut trees have yellow catkins, the tiny pink and blue violets my grandmother planted a hundred or so years ago are popping up in the lawn, the forsythias are flashing their bright yellows, cherry blossoms are peeking out, and I see early rhododendron blooms in front of the covid-vacant school down the road.

Indian Plum
Forsythia

If I weren’t so stinking old this week, I’d have cut the bottoms off my pant legs, dug out a mitt, ball, and bat and found a game of workup this afternoon. Will nature bust me again for over optimism? Maybe. But I have to say, today, I’d give anything today to have my mother take a hairbrush to my bottom for cutting off my jeans.

We’re breaking free of the pandemic. The Whatcom County Library System has opened its branches at twenty-five percent capacity. I think I will wait until after my second shot before I venture inside, but the day is coming. In a month, planning a haircut will no longer be a soul-shuddering existential calculation.

Covid-19 had me spooked.

I’ve studied the risk calculations with all the engineering and mathematics on my resume. I have enough going against me that the odds look about fifty-fifty that I would go to the hospital if I contracted covid, and one in ten that I would not come out alive. I’m not brave, not likely to venture a round of Russian Roulette, which is close to my odds if I ever “catch the covid,” as I heard somebody say.

A few months back, I seriously doubted that I would see next Christmas, and was awed and grateful when I saw my fourth grandson, Charlie, back in November when the death count was climbing.

But today, I’m contemplating that I might just see Charlie as a young man, looking to find himself in the world. See our eighteen year old twin grandsons as established adults, and six year old Dario perhaps starting a family.

Yeah! It’s spring folks.