I may not survive COVID-19, but it won’t be for lack of trying

Next Tuesday will mark 60 days since my last visit to a public place, an eye doctor appointment in the afternoon followed by a late night trip to the supermarket. A couple of days later, the governor issued a “stay home” directive for West Virginia, and I quit going where the people are.

It feels like a lot longer, but before I complain about the inconvenience of having to stay home for two months, I remember that my parents lived through both the Great Depression and World War II and came out okay on the other side. My dad was even alive – although very young – during the flu epidemic of 1918 and all of WWI, so the fact that I have to shop for essentials at Amazon, buy groceries online and use the drive-up window at CVS seems insignificant compared to what his generation went through.

That’s why it puzzles me to see people losing their minds because they can’t get a haircut, work out at the gym or go bowling. I’m astonished to see photos of people jamming into restaurants in Colorado or bars in Wisconsin without masks and ignoring social distancing guidelines, and don’t even get me started with those public officials who are pushing to reopen schools. I think that everybody who wants to reopen our classrooms in the fall should have to report to one every day, interact with as many students as possible, eat in the cafeteria and see how long it takes before they get sick.

I understand what’s happening to the nation’s economy and I truly feel bad for the millions of people who have lost their jobs. I do. I’m retired, so I don’t have to worry about going to work. Every month, money just shows up in my bank account. But if I were to weigh making a premature fix to the economy versus keeping millions of people from getting sick and thousands of people from dying, the economy would come in second on my list.

I believe that Georgia was the first state to officially reopen for business and immediately they saw a 40% spike in coronavirus cases. In Michigan, armed hoodlums protesting against lockdown orders from their governor staged rallies at the state capitol, then went home and infected friends and family throughout rural areas of the state that the virus previously had spared. Texas reopened recently and suffered the largest single day of death since the pandemic began.

I don’t know what part of “stay home, stay alive” was confusing for these people.

Now the governor of West Virginia – who it seemed was doing the right thing throughout the past few weeks – is phasing out his stay home order and opening portions of the state’s business a little at a time. I’ve been contacted by not one but two dentists asking me to make an appointment (no thanks), stores downtown are starting to advertise their new hours and gyms will be allowed to reopen starting Monday. Thank god for that, because panting and sweating through aerobic exercises with 50 of my closest friends or pumping iron or riding the stationary bikes are certainly among my top priorities during a pandemic that has killed more than 85,000 Americans in a little over two months.

(Here’s an idea: Instead of risking your life at a gym, try doing pushups or situps in your living room, running in place in the garage or lifting two milk jugs full of water on the patio out back.)

I drove to the Post Office a little while ago to mail my absentee ballots. It was my big road trip for the day. I slipped the envelopes into the neck of the big blue mailbox outside on the curb and drove away. I saw no one and never left my car. I did, however, observe maybe 20 people riding bicycles, walking the city streets, exiting stores and otherwise hanging out. Of the 20, only one was wearing a mask. I’m afraid that no one can help them if they refuse to help themselves.

Next week, I have to make a decision. I have two doctor appointments, one of which will be conducted by tele-health and one that may require me to drive to Morgantown. Ironically, it’s the same ophthalmologist I saw the last time I went out. His office has been closed and I’m waiting to see if it even opens back up next week.

Beyond that, I’m happy to keep on keeping on, or, more accurately, to keep on not keeping on. I’m not required to go to the dentist or the gym or the bowling alley just because they’re open and I’ve never been one to get a lot of haircuts. If I want one, we have clippers, so if the mood strikes me I’ll get my wife to shave it all off and I can start over again from scratch. I never go anywhere, so what does it matter how I look? Besides, I’ve got a lot of hats.

In summary, we have a long way to go before there’s a vaccine to prevent this virus or even an effective way to treat it, and we have a president who seems to oppose even testing for it because the number of victims makes him look bad in an election year. That tells me that we’ll be staying home and avoiding crowds for a lot longer than 60 days.

So in the meantime, I’m doing what I’m supposed to do to survive in the age of COVID-19, even if those around me aren’t. I’m not going out of my way to risk my life for some stupid reason, and I can’t understand why other people are willing to do that. I don’t know what will happen in the future or whether life will ever return to normal, and frankly, I don’t know if I will survive this pandemic or not, but if I don’t, it won’t be for a lack of trying.

That’s about that all any of us can do...and I encourage my friends to do the same.

More thoughts on Kent State, Michigan and COVID-19

I’ve been watching several documentaries and eyewitness accounts of the May 4, 1970, Kent State University shootings and a couple of facts stand out. (I guess we can call them facts when virtually everybody who was there seems to have observed the same thing.)

First, witnesses all agreed that the students were peaceably assembling to protest the U.S. incursion into Cambodia during the war in Vietnam, which prompted the governor of Ohio to call in the National Guard. None of the students was armed, but “a couple of students” were seen throwing small rocks at the Guardsmen. No one saw any soldiers hit by rocks, although admittedly that could have happened.  

In response, Guard troops tossed a few tear gas canisters in the general direction of the crowd, drove around in a Jeep warning students to disperse and marched around the campus for a while doing “some kind of maneuvers” before climbing a hill and heading toward the door, so to speak.

“We thought they were going back to where they came from,” one witness said, when suddenly the rear guard turned 135 degrees and started shooting at the unarmed students with live ammunition. In 13 seconds, four students were killed and nine others were wounded. That part has been well-documented over the last 50 years, and descriptions of the event are generally consistent.  

Second, I learned for the first time that immediately after the shootings, somebody cut the telephone lines, leaving the campus without means of communication and effectively imposing a media blackout on the Kent campus. The idea was to keep students and others from calling friends and family to report on what had happened, which would have allowed those eyewitness accounts to find their way into the news media before the government could spin them away. The goal, in my opinion and the opinion of others, was to enable the authorities – under the direction of Republican Governor James Rhodes – to craft their own narrative about the shootings so that blame could be cast upon the students themselves and not the National Guardsmen who fired into the crowd.

You can make of that what you will, but I find it ironic that 50 years later, under a Republican administration, our leaders are still manipulating the news media by writing their own narrative and bending the truth by labeling any story they don’t like as “fake news.” The difference is there’s so much more media today…and they’re so much better at it than they were in 1970.

There's another irony that keeps coming back to me since anti-lockdown protests started a couple of weeks ago and men with guns started storming a number of our state capitols.

At Kent State, the victims of the tragedy were unarmed protesters who were peaceably exercising their First Amendment rights to free speech and assembly. They didn’t threaten anybody’s life or health and for that, they were shot to death. Last week, in Michigan, the opposite occurred. An angry band of urban terrorists with assault rifles and other guns – also claiming First Amendment protection – stormed the capitol to protest a government directive to stay home during a killer pandemic. In this case, the protesters were the people with the guns, and their rally actually did threaten the lives and health of civilians who found themselves downwind of potentially infectious coronavirus spew.

Finally, while there are differences, there are also similarities between the two events. No one was ever held accountable for the shootings at Kent State, and no one was sanctioned or punished for the assault on the Michigan legislature. In my opinion, someone should have gone to jail in each of those incidents, and in both cases, I believe it should have been the people with the guns.

Why do very fine people need so much weaponry?

When I was in college, a lot of people my age were protesters. They protested against a lot of things, but mainly it was the Vietnam War.

At any time during those years, if a gang of young people had shown up outside a state capitol dressed in camouflage clothing, wearing bandana masks and armed with handguns or assault rifles, they would have been shot on sight. No questions asked. I mean, c’mon, four young kids were shot dead at Kent State University during a peaceful demonstration in 1970 and they weren’t even carrying signs. I believe a couple of the victims were carrying nothing more threatening than college textbooks while walking across campus to get to class.

At the very least, crowds of demonstrators from my era would have been dispersed by riot police with teargas, nightsticks, rubber bullets and angry dogs. I know this because, well, because that’s what actually happened.

It’s a new world today, boys and girls. Demonstrators are showing up in cities and state capitols around the country carrying handmade signs, waving American and Confederate (and sometimes Nazi) flags and strapped with AR-15 rifles across their backs like one of the Magnificent Seven. Not only are they shouting and waving signs and blocking traffic, but yesterday a herd of protesters shoved their way into the Michigan statehouse and tried to get onto the floor of the House of Representatives.

It was so bad that some members of the legislature were wearing bulletproof vests and said they feared for their personal safety.

Was anybody killed? Not that I know of. I didn’t read that anybody was even arrested.

So here’s the irony of the situation: These heavily armed gunmen were out in the streets and in the halls of government protesting a statewide directive designed to protect them from a killer virus just a day or so after the number of fatalities from the disease surpassed the 20-year death toll in the Vietnam War. To say it doesn’t make sense is a colossal understatement, but that’s about all I’ve got at the present time.

Let’s recap: In the 1970s, we protested against the war in Vietnam. In 2020, we protest against an order to keep us alive while a virus kills more people than the Viet Cong. Can you see why I’m having a hard time getting my head around this phenomenon?

Here’s what’s even more troubling: These protesters are mostly bearded and angry white men who are hanging their hats on their First Amendment rights to assemble and speak their minds. As a former journalist, I’ve always been a staunch defender of the First Amendment, but I’m starting to wonder just how far it allows people to go.

I guess a legal scholar would have to answer that question because frankly, I don’t know.

And here’s what’s the most troubling: In a tweet on Friday morning, Donald J. Trump described the Michigan protesters as “very good people” and suggested that the governor should strike a deal with them. “The Governor of Michigan should give a little, and put out the fire,” Trump wrote. “These are very good people, but they are angry. They want their lives back again, safely! See them, talk to them, make a deal.”

“Very good people,” he said. That’s kinda like Trump’s famous declaration about “good people on both sides.” It makes me want to run down the street with a bullhorn shouting “Charlottesville! Charlottesville! Charlottesville!"

Before I die, I want someone to answer a question that has been nagging me for years. If these people are just expressing their First Amendment rights to free speech and assembly, why do they need the guns? I suspect they paid a lot of money for these assault rifles and don’t get to wave them around very often, so they take advantage of any opportunity to show them off in public.

Finally, I want to make one more point. I don’t know if these demonstrators realize how seriously they are endangering their own health – and the health of anybody else with whom they come in close contact – by ignoring stay home orders and staging these rallies en masse. This is exactly the kind of gathering the doctors have warned us about, and the very reason for the stay home orders in the first place.   

Of course, I guess you could argue that those Kent State students didn’t know how seriously they were risking their own lives by walking along a campus road to get to class. Some of them were very fine people too, I suspect, but that was a different story altogether.