THE FEAR IS WORSE THAN THE VIRUS

It’s not the problem; it’s how you react to it. So goes the aphorism and 2020 exemplifies it. All the sum-ups of the year past proclaimed that Covid-19 made it the worst year of the century, and maybe it was. If so, it wasn’t because of the virus; it was government reaction to it — shutting down virtually everything. Many now believe those shutdowns have caused more suffering and death than the virus has.

By the end of last year, evidence to support that contention multiplied, but not enough for big government or its mainstream media spokespeople to acknowledge it. Instead, they’ve doubled down on fear hype. Recent widespread testing indicates that perhaps half the population has already been infected and has immunity. While more deadly than the seasonal flu, chances of dying from Covid are extremely low. In September, the CDC reported that the under-69 population of those infected had more than a 99.5% chance of surviving it. So why the continued shutdowns? 

And, why do teachers’s unions insist that schools remain closed when the CDC reports that children aged 0-19 survive Covid at a rate of 99.997%? Surely it’s not to protect them. Why do blue-state governors and superintendents acquiesce? Teachers’s unions are among the party’s biggest contributors. After Tuesday’s Georgia elections, Democrats could control the entire federal government, but is our country uniting behind them? A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll demonstrates that although most Americans accept that Joe Biden won the 2020 election, 39% think the election was rigged. That points to a seriously divided country.

Is this division a recent phenomenon? Many of us first became aware of roiling discontent within the electorate when the Tea Party emerged ten years ago. Most agree it was a grassroots conservative movement, but I can recall what happened when a large contingent of Tea Party activists first made their presence known at the 2010 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). Republicans were wary because it had no leaders and wasn’t part of the Republican power structure. CPAC’s 3-day conference program that year didn’t even mention the Tea Party.

I remember walking into the hotel lobby in Washington and the first thing I noticed was a man dressed as an original 1773 Massachusetts patriot complete with tricorne hat and waving a yellow “Don’t Tread On Me” flag. However no one mentioned the Tea Party in any of the sessions I attended. It was as if it didn’t exist. And Democrats were not going to welcome them either, given the Tea Party first coalesced following the narrow passage of government-expanding Obamacare in 2009 with not a single Republican vote.

Here was an amorphous throng of citizens dead-set against big government — and shunned by both major parties. Mitt Romney ignored the Tea Party in his 2012 presidential run and lost. Looking back now, we should not have been surprised that an outsider with zero political experience and promising to “drain the swamp” won the presidency in 2016. If it weren’t for his narcissism he would likely have won a second term. Instead, he was toppled by an aged career politician who stayed in his basement throughout the campaign in fear of either Covid or making a gaffe, or both.

After the first two weeks in early 2020, many Americans opposed government’s massive response to Covid. Shutting down the economy and triggering a near depression, it then created trillions of dollars out of thin air and distributed them to citizens, businesses, as well as various institutions and organizations large and small. Federal debt, already out of control, went into the stratosphere. Governors, most of them in blue states, extended shutdowns again and again, and now into 2021. All but 13 states have ordered their citizens to wear masks everywhere.

When gubernatorial authority to shut down states is challenged in court, judges have so far ruled it unconstitutional — even though states do have authority to deal with infectious disease. Anthony Fauci objects to that though, claiming that federalism is undermining the U.S. response he coordinates. Evidence that shutdowns at any level are effective in controlling spread is thin.

 According to an article in Just The News, when states report Covid statistics, nearly all conflate patients hospitalized “with Covid” and “due to Covid.” As more people are tested and found to have antibodies, it’s inevitable that more hospitalized patients will too. Hospitals are not being overfilled with patients “due to Covid” as media and government repeatedly proclaim, but “with Covid.” That’s an extremely important distinction that few Americans recognize.

Covid is a problem, yes, but it’s much worse when government and media stoke Covid fear to justify seizure of power over the day-to-day lives of Americans — and further dividing our country. Two centuries ago, President Andrew Jackson advised Americans: “Never take counsel of your fears,” yet that’s exactly what we’re doing.

Let's Not Take Counsel From Our Fears

We’re finally beginning to look past the virus. Some expect “things” will eventually be back to normal but I’m not one of them, not after what we’ve been through. It’s been unprecedented. The world and the United States have been through many epidemics but this one will have changed us the most by far. Why? It’s not the virus itself so much as the response to it and foremost is damage our response has inflicted on our economy. Ultimately that may kill more people than the virus does.

Do whatever he tells you. What can go wrong?

Americans are ambivalent. The “We’re all in this together” feeling has been nice. We all pulled together to defeat a common enemy much as we did in World War II, but that’s changing. We’re trying to get to herd immunity and that’s a good thing too, but if we also get herd mentality that’s not, and we're seeing two herd mentalities divided along political lines. The blue herd believes we need to be guided by government and the red herd believes we need to think and act for ourselves.

Last month our very-blue Governor Janet Mills closed Maine’s golf courses and beaches because that’s what they did in Massachusetts and those people might come here. Today she said her shutdown will continue through May for most things. Restaurants must stay closed until June — hotels and campgrounds until July. She won’t open northern Maine counties with few if any cases though federal guidelines would allow that. 

Governor Janet Mills telling us what to do last Tuesday

Maine mirrors the nation with an urban/rural political divide both politically and virally. Our two southern counties of York and Cumberland contain nearly half the population but almost all virus cases. Southern Maine is overwhelmingly leftist. Rural northern Maine is largely conservative. A rhetorical question someone asked me: If Montana had half of all the Covid 19 deaths, would we shut down New York City? Similarly, if Maine’s rural Aroostook County had 95% of Maine’s virus deaths, would Governor Mills shut down Portland?

Virus response was handled from Washington at first. President Trump listened to his medical advisors — not soon enough for his chronic critics — but he eventually followed their recommendations. The USA did what most other countries did: we shut down. Then we learned the models used by those medical advisors were faulty. Only then did authority devolve to the governors. Now governors are taking different courses and that’s good, but it begs the question: should we be allowing the decision-making process to take place at an even lower level? 

As I mentioned in a last week’s column, that’s what Sweden has done. Ordinary Swedes make their own decisions about how to react, and it appears to be working. According to NPR, Sweden’s Ambassador to the USA recently announced: “We could reach herd immunity in the capital as early as next month.” That’s the goal, right? We cannot rely on getting a vaccine. That will take over a year at best and there’s little likelihood our economy would survive that long a ahutdown.

Doctor Murphy

Writing Monday in the New York Post, Covid-positive, Bronx ER Doctor Daniel Murphy advises: “I’ve worked the coronavirus front line — and I say it’s time to start opening up.” He was swamped with Covid-19 patients early on, and then noticed the virus peaked at 1:00 pm on April 7th when “the number of arriving COVID-19 patients dropped below the number discharged, transferred or deceased.” He was that specific.

“This was striking,” he continued, “because the community I serve is poor. Some are homeless. Most work in ‘essential,’ low-paying jobs, where distancing isn’t easy. Nevertheless, the wave passed over us, peaked and subsided. The way this transpired tells me the ebb and flow had more to do with the natural course of the outbreak than it did with the lockdown.” This scenario supports the Israeli mathematician I mentioned in last week’s column who said the virus goes through an 8-week cycle regardless of whether there’s a shutdown or not.

Israeli Mathematician Yitzhak Ben-Israel

Our president, governors, and mayors may discover very soon that they’re not in charge of what people do. A tailor in NYC today defied orders and reopened his shop. Nearby businesses admire his courage and declared they will open too. After Governor Mills announcements today, Maine businesses may follow suit. That would be very American. Early in this process we all took counsel from our fears, which many Americans historically warned against including Andrew Jackson, Stonewall Jackson, and George Patton. Let’s remember that as we restart our economy.

Request to Require -- Tolerate to Mandate

In its early days, what we now know as the “LGBT Community” begged society for tolerance of “alternative lifestyles.” Then it asked for acceptance. After gaining some measure of political clout, it demanded “rights.” Lately, it is imposing conformity by legislating civil penalties against people who adhere to biological facts and religious beliefs about LGBT issues. How soon before it criminalizes dissent? How soon will we discover as Cool Hand Luke did that if you don’t, “Get your mind right,” you’ll “spend a night in the box.”

Last week I saw two stories alerting me that it’s just around the corner. The first was in National Review about a former 30-year Emergency Room doctor in the UK who didn’t have his mind right and was fired. His offense? He said he wouldn’t use a “preferred pronoun” when treating a hypothetical “transexual.” He’d refuse to call a man who claimed he was a woman “she.” He said — as a scientist — that it’s impossible for a man to change into a woman. “If somebody has male XY chromosomes and male genitalia,” he said, “I cannot in good conscience call them a woman.” As a Christian, he believes God created humans: “Man and woman he created them,” he said, citing Genesis, Chapter 5: Verse 2.

Dr. Mackereth

Doctors in the UK, however, work for the government and the LGBT lobby mandates conformity from all government employees. It determined that Dr. David Mackereth didn’t have his mind right and could no longer practice medicine. At fifty-five, he was out of a job. Government would force him to ignore science, deny his religious faith, and lie in order to continue practicing. “I knew it could be the end of my work as a doctor,” he said, “but I could not live with myself if I didn’t speak up. It would be dishonest — and I didn’t want to live a lie.”

The second story was in The Federalist: “Starting July 1, 2020, all Illinois public schools are legally required to teach children LGBT history and only buy textbooks that include the topic. NPR affiliate Illinois Public Radio labeled Christian and conservative opposition to this law while it was being considered as stemming from ‘hate groups.’”

According to government-sponsored radio in Illinois, Catholics who believe Catholic doctrine that homosexuality is intrinsically disordered belong to a “hate group.” How long before Catholics are charged with “hate crimes” and imprisoned?

I’ve watched the steady advance of leftist control in public education ever since my own career began in 1975. In 2000, I had to pick out a textbook for 8th graders, but all texts by the standard publishers contained a pronounced left-wing bias and they were costly. I told the principal if I could pick save him money and purchase two cheaper texts for each student: leftist A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn and conservative: A Patriot’s History of the United States by Schweikart & Allen — I could get both for far less the price of one standard text. I could then compare and contrast perspectives in each of my lessons. He said that would be fine if I were to continue teaching, but what if I retired? What was the likelihood that whoever replaced me could do that?

I had to admit it wasn’t likely and had to pick one of the standard, leftist texts: Prentice Hall’s The American Nation, the most-used text in the country at the time. I didn’t like it but figured I would offer students contrasting perspectives from other sources when the bias got too strong. As bad as The American Nation was, it seems middle of the road now compared to what is mandated in Illinois — as well as in California, Colorado, New Jersey, and Oregon where similar laws have been passed. The left controls education thoroughly now, kindergarten to graduate school, and the LGBT lobby is riding high.

Illinois teachers' guide from Human Rights Campaign

Illinois’ Evanston/Skokie schools adopted a curriculum like what will be mandatory next year across the state. The equal sign logo of the Human Rights Campaign — the nation's largest, most powerful LGBT lobby — is stamped all over the materials. Children 3-5 are told about Jazz, a boy who wanted to be a girl. They see a video in which he reads from a book about his transition that made him happy. At the end, Jazz says: “To all the kids out there who are seeing this book for the first time, I just want to say that you can be like Jazz. You can be your true self.”

Illinois teachers' guide from Human Rights Campaign

The left insists homosexuals and transgenders are born that way, but what if they aren’t? Research at Brown University strongly suggests that: “‘Rapid-onset gender dysphoria’ [transgenderism] may be a social contagion linked with having friends who identify as LGBT, an identity politics culture, and an increase in internet use.” Are public schools turning into laboratories for LGBT identity culture?

Today's Trends

My mother keeps track of her thirty grandchildren and her forty-six great-grandchildren. She knows all their names too — pretty remarkable for a woman in her nineties. She’s getting forgetful, but not about family. She had eight children of her own and I’m the fourth. Ours was a large family, but not unique. My best friend across the street was one of seven and so was my wife. We had only four children, which was considered a lot for my generation. Fewer Americans want to have any these days though. I’m seeing more people of childbearing age raising dogs and cats instead of babies and I’ve written about it several times including here and here. Why don’t Americans want to have children anymore? What is happening to us?

Ma on her 90th birthday with a few of her descendants

Our population is still growing but mostly because of immigration. The percent of Americans born somewhere else is approaching record levels. In Portland, Maine, one of six people was born in another country and most of those who are women are having children at much higher rates than native-born Americans. They, at least, have some hope for the future, which is one meaningful aspect of bearing children. Another is willingness to give of oneself.

Americans tend not to marry much anymore either from what I can see. For two months, I’ve been advertising an apartment above our garage, and while several couples have inquired, none have been married. Typically, a woman calls me to say she is interested. I ask if she’s alone and she says no, it would be for her and her boyfriend. That’s the norm these days. When I say I need first and last months’ rent, a security deposit, and a credit check, that all presents too high a bar for most to get over.

Pondering this, I saw a story on CBS News that two out of three Americans could not cover a $500 unexpected expense such as a car repair. I was shocked and realized that statistic bodes ill for our nation. There have always been people who live close to the edge and spend every dollar that comes their way as quickly as they can, but 66% of us live like that now? Even when we were a young family living below the federal poverty line, we kept that much on hand. That was back in the 1970s when $500 could buy about what $2500 buys now. It was hard to save up but we did so by eating a lot of soup and watching where every penny went. My wife and I agree those times were among the happiest of our lives. Most people we knew lived similarly, but  that way of life is not the norm anymore. What is happening to us?

Used to be that when people went broke, they would go to local churches to ask for money to pay the electric bill, the rent, buy heating oil, food, or whatever was the most pressing basic need. Doing so, they had to be accountable to the priest, minister, or rabbi about their spending habits, work habits, and/or lifestyle that might have gotten them into their predicament. If they went to someone in their family for a loan, the same accountability would usually apply. They’d have to explain how they got in the hole they were in and what they were doing to climb out of it.

Today it’s different. Today people go to government. In the 1960s when President Johnson declared his “War on Poverty,” the federal government began supporting people. There are forms to fill out but few inquiries about lifestyle. Either you qualify for government aid or you don’t. That aid increased steadily to the point where it now spans womb to tomb. It used to be that most had an incentive to save up for emergencies, but if they should save a given amount today it would disqualify them. In 2014, America reached the point where more than half of us received some form of government benefit. How far can “entitlements” expand? We’ll be $20 trillion in debt when President Obama leaves office -- double what it was when he was first inaugurated, and most has gone to pay for unsustainable social programs. That’s a whole year's GDP. Still we hear candidates promise to make college free and forgive another trillion in student debt with no explanation for how they’ll pay for it.

Americans are living beyond their means and so is the government upon which they depend. It’s not enough anymore to ask what is happening to us. We must ask what will happen if we continue on this path.

Eco-Sexual Passion

I almost never remember to bring my own bags into the grocery stores of South Portland, Maine. That city, as well as Portland across the harbor, wanted to ban all disposable plastic bags. Instead their city councils enacted a five cent fee for paper or plastic bags that used to be free. At Shaw’s I could pay ten cents for a reusable plastic bag but I have a dozen of them folded up and bulging out of the inside door compartments of my car. Do I remember to bring them into the store though? Hardly ever, so that means I have to buy still more at the checkout rather than hold up the line by going out to my car and retrieving a couple from my growing collection. In North Conway, NH where I do most of my food shopping at the Shaw’s and Hannaford stores there, bags are still free.

So who benefits? Well, the stores do because they get paid five cents each for bags they used to give away. Greenie city councilors do because they can pose as environmental champions, saviors of ocean creatures who they claim would die from ingesting discarded bags. Greenie citizens do because, when they dutifully carry their reusable bags into the store, they feel like they’re doing their bit to save the planet from evil corporatist, Republicans who all want to poison the environment as well as the people in it. Freeport and other coastal Maine municipalities are considering similar bag ordinances and it’s coming soon to stores near you too.

Have these ordinances been effectively saving ocean creatures? It’s too early to tell. Even though I find them annoying, they’re likely to spread widely in progressive areas. Here’s a clue: according to a National Review Online article I read last week: “A professor at Santa Monica College took a group of students on an ‘EcoSexual Sextravaganza’ trip earlier this month, during which they ‘married the ocean’ and were encouraged to ‘consummate’ that marriage.” There were pictures of blushing brides holding flowers as they waded into the ocean for “consummation.” Given this level of green weenie eco-sexual passion, it’s inevitable.

I don’t return cans and bottles to Maine redemption centers either. It’s just not worth the trip. Like everyone else, I have to pay five cents for the containers my beer and soft drinks come in, and fifteen cents for the bottles in which my wine comes. When I go to the dump in Lovell, Maine where I live — excuse me, I mean when I go to Lovell’s solid waste recycling center — I put the five-cent cans and bottles in the barrels provided. Attendants redeem the beer cans and beer bottles, but they grind up the fifteen-cent wine bottles in the glass-crushing machine because it isn’t worth it for the town to retrieve the deposit. 

New Hampshire has no bottle deposit law either, but most states around the region do, so NH stores sell bottles and cans all imprinted with other states’ deposit laws, but do not collect any deposit money. So, if Maine residents like me buy beer in New Hampshire, we might collect five cents per can/bottle in Maine. But, you would violate laws enacted by Maine’s greenie, world-saving voters who seem to comprise the majority, though I don’t see how they can be enforced.

Glass bottles and aluminum cans don’t pollute the environment when people throw them away, but they’re a kind of visual pollution. My wife periodically picks them up beside our country road and lugs them home for me to take to the dump — I mean the solid waste recycling center. She doesn’t do it for the money, she’s just obsessive that way. Clearly Maine’s deposit law is not preventing litter as intended. 

So who benefits from bottle laws? Well, the state is the primary beneficiary because it gets the money from stores selling the containers. How much money? We don’t know. A study commissioned in 2007 verified that we don't know. It did determine that in 2002 about 750,000,000 bottles were sold and the state collected between five and fifteen cents on each. How many were redeemed? We don’t know, because only about 19% of the surveys sent to stores and redemption centers were returned. 

From this writer’s perspective, Maine’s bottle law is a bother. Are Maine’s highways cleaner than New Hampshire’s? Not that I can see. The law has been in effect since 1978 and it’s not likely to be repealed whether it’s effective or not. It’s another source of revenue

for government-loving Greenies who are ever looking to make the rest of us adhere to the roadmap of their never-ending journey to big-government utopia.

Rich and Poor

Our federal government classified me as poor when I moved to Maine in August, 1977. My family of four was “under the poverty line” according to their way of measuring things. I had just taken a job as Director of Special Education for Maine School Administrative District #72 in Fryeburg at an annual salary of $9200. With four individuals to feed, clothe, and house, our federal government said I was poor and eligible for lots of programs which we didn’t use. That our daughter, Annie, was still in utero portended deeper “poverty” when she was to be born in December. Then our son, Ryan, came along five years later when my salary was still about the same. As a family of six, we must have gone from poor to very poor in the eyes of government.

 

Rather than take assistance from taxpayers, I chose to take on additional work. For most of my teaching career, I carried two or three part-time jobs as a caretaker, a writer, and a ski instructor — working all four simultaneously during several of those years. After all the kids were in school, my wife took on various part time jobs as well. She waitressed, cleaned houses, and drove a school bus before going back to school herself to become a therapist. She’s been doing that for almost twenty years, the last five or so part time. Each of us now works the equivalent of a half time job — roughly twenty hours a week. Now our federal government considers me rich because our combined household income is in the top quintile according the census statistics. I don’t worry about bills because my wife and I made it a priority to pay them off some time ago.

Ours is a common story. The “poor” don’t remain poor unless they stay on government programs. If they work, they often become “rich.”

Angus Deaton

Why tell you all this? Because it was announced last week that Princeton University’s Angus Deaton was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics, in part because of his work measuring poverty. I didn’t expect to agree with Deaton on much considering the Nobel committee awarded a previous economics prize to Paul Krugman, but I looked him up anyway and found his observations quite reasonable. The first thing I came to was a 2003 essay he wrote called “Measuring Poverty.” In it, Deaton writes:

“Everyone has some idea what poverty is, and most people have little difficulty answering the question, ‘Do you consider yourself poor?’ although some people need a moment or two to think about it. Nor do people find it hard to answer the same question about their neighbors or other people that they know. Yet these simple ideas turn out to be hard to extend to countries, and harder still to the world as a whole.”

International agencies like the United Nations and the World Bank work mainly to mitigate poverty rather than spur economic development. Doing so, they allow local people to self-identify according to Deaton and that’s a problem, he says: 

“…It is not possible to push this local poverty identification too far. If the sums to be distributed are large enough, they become worth misappropriating, and there is an incentive for people to identify their friends and relatives (or themselves) as poor. Similarly, some NGOs have discovered that, if they use the poverty identification to enroll people into employment or training schemes, then after a few visits everyone is reported to be poor.”

I would point out here that in local school districts there is a similar phenomenon — applications for free and reduced lunches sent to each family each September are not vetted. I’ve asked people in at least three Maine districts and none vet the applications. They don’t check to see if families fudge their income/assets because the district qualifies for lots of additional federal and state aid based on percentage “qualifying” for free or reduced lunch.

When I was teaching economics, we found it necessary to define poverty. Students and I agreed that one is poor if he lacks sufficient funds to purchase food, clothing, shelter, and medical care to sustain life. We also agreed that someone is rich if he has enough for those basic needs — and some left over. He’s a little rich if he has a little left, and very rich if he has a lot left.

There’s another definition on which my wife and I agree: We’re rich, not just because we have everything we need and some left over, but also because we have everything we want — everything that money can buy, at least. Some may say our wants are modest and maybe they are, but they’re ours. They were established during lean times when our family was young and they haven’t changed much. We learned to live on less and haven’t forgotten how. We learned to be happy with what we have, and that became the habit of a lifetime.