Stuff I didn’t think about until now
Confederate war statues, the letter "B" and the highly dangerous music of George Thorogood...
According to yesterday’s Kansas City Star they’re thinking of reopening bars in Texas. I’ve been to Texas on numerous occasions and I gotta say alcohol always improved the experience.
On the other hand, I’ve never been anywhere that didn’t look better after a three-drink buzz so maybe it’s my fault, as most things are.
Anyway…
Thinking about reopening led to the cartoon above. Never thought about it before, but apparently bars are especially problematic because they tend to play loud music and that makes people lean forward to be heard and that makes it easier to spread the COVID-19 virus.
So you just might be safer in a bar that plays Yanni than a bar that plays George Thorogood, but if you enjoy Yanni’s music you don’t have that much to live for anyway. Just a personal opinion, but I think you know I’m right.
Up until now I didn’t think about loud music in bars putting you in danger, but lately I’ve had to think about a lot of stuff I never thought about before.
For instance…
Confederate statues in Union states
According to nearly 47 seconds of internet research, about 1-in-12 statues honoring Confederate war heroes are in states that remained in the Union.
That’s according to the Washington Post and I’d tell you more about what the Post had to say except I’m not a subscriber so they put up an ad asking me to pay to see the rest of the article and I’m not going to do that so we’ll have to settle for their headline which is all I can see with that ad in the way.
But if my past research is correct a lot of Confederate statues were put up during the Jim Crow era and their main purpose to was to serve notice to people of a certain ethnic persuasion; the South might have lost the war, but don’t take that Emancipation Proclamation stuff too seriously — we’re still in charge.
You gotta hand it to the racists; they managed to make the Confederacy about chivalry and honor and a bunch of other BS when it was actually a bunch of bigots fighting to keep slavery alive.
As an example, we’ll use that kindly Southern gentleman, Robert E. Lee.
According to the Associated Press, a while back someone used Facebook to claim that Lee did not own slaves and opposed slavery and that post was shared tens of thousands of times. But the AP looked into that claim and it turns out Lee not only owned slaves, if they tried to escape he’d have them beaten or if he didn’t have a lackey handy to do the beating for him, beat his slaves himself.
The image of Robert E. Lee as a kind-hearted Southern gentleman is false and if you want to read more about Lee, his views on slaves and slavery, here’s a link to an article on The Atlantic website:
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/06/the-myth-of-the-kindly-general-lee/529038/
Now here’s another bit of fictional history that recently made the rounds: the Civil War was not about slavery, it was about state’s rights.
According to The Atlantic website, this is: “an attempt to whitewash the Confederate cause as a noble one.” The Atlantic article says every state that seceded mentioned slavery as the cause of their secession.
Up until now I’d always pretty much accepted the revisionist history offered in defense of the Confederacy, but recent events have forced me to examine my own beliefs and changed my point of view.
Today’s episode is brought to you by the letter ‘B’
Somebody started asking why “black” wasn’t capitalized and “French” and “Chinese” were and I had to admit I never thought about it, so my bad. Apparently I’m not the only one that had overlooked the inconsistency and changed their policy because I’m now seeing “Black” capitalized in a lot of news stories.
As a result I’ve now started capitalizing “Black” too, but then that makes me think I should also capitalize “White” but every time I do I that I feel like the next word should be “Power” or “Supremacy.”
Also; why do so many White Supremacists seem below average?
As Mike Myers would say on Coffee Talk: “Discuss.”
How many people are we willing to kill?
Some people have argued that people die in car wrecks every day and we still don’t shut down the freeways, so I had to look into that and see if it was a valid argument.
According to the National Safety Council an estimated 38,000 Americans lost their lives in car crashes last year and we’re now closing in on 190,000 COVID-19 deaths with about four months to go. It’s already about five times as many deaths as car crashes…are we still OK with that?
Also, those 38,000 car crash victims didn’t all die at the same time.
That’s what has the medical community freaked out; if we didn’t do a shutdown and everybody got sick at once the medical system would be overwhelmed and people who might have been saved had there been enough medical personnel and hospital beds to go around were going to die.
If we were going to get sick and die, the medical system needed us to get organized and do it in an orderly fashion.
Which reminds me of the Cuban Missile Crisis drills we did as kids; we’d all go out on the playground and stand in alphabetical order and looking back I now figure it wasn’t for our safety; it was probably to make it easier to identify the bodies.
But now we’ve gotten off track and I say that like it’s partially your fault. So let’s quit finger-pointing and get back to the subject at hand.
According to the CDC, between the 1976-1977 flu season and 2006-2007 flu season flu-associated deaths went from a low of 3,000 to a high of about 49,000. So clearly, the virus we’re dealing with now is much more deadly and we need to think about how many deaths we can tolerate – and I have some candidates – before we reopen.
38,000 dead people are apparently OK, is 380,000 too many?
But since the current administration is going to pretend everything is hunky-dory, we’re not going to have the how-many-dead-people-can-we-tolerate discussion, but it’s something we ought to think about.
Losing teaches you more than winning
My friends accuse me of relating everything in Life to sports which is absolutely true and I do that because sports distill Life into three-hour contests and if you pay attention you can learn something.
Here’s today’s lesson:
When you’re winning you’re not motivated to change or grow because everything is going OK. When you’re losing you’re forced to think about what you’re doing wrong and what you need to change to have success.
Right now it feels like we’re losing.
The coronavirus crisis, police brutality, racial inequality and, if you hadn’t noticed, California has burst into flames, so maybe we need to think about stuff we hadn’t thought about before and what we need to change to get back on track.
And if you don’t get anything else out of this, keep one thing in mind: if you’re going to Texas anytime soon, bring your own booze.
Exceptional essay today Lee. Thanks!