Skip to main content

One year on: CoVid-19

 It's been a full year now that a state of emergency was declared by former president Trump for the Novel Coronavirus CoVid19.

Friday the 13th, 2020, was the last day that I ventured out maskless.  I remember heading into Sam's Club that afternoon and seeing the place nearly vacant.  I grabbed the last flat of canned beans, and prepared for locking down for 2 weeks - a pattern that would repeat throughout 2020.  As an aside, I made sure to keep 2 weeks of supplies through the 2020 election through President Biden's inauguration, and after the Trumpist insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6, I'm very glad I did so.

The uncertainty was palpable back then - hence, my articles perusing the old headlines and papers from 1918, trying to parse out any useful, pertinent information.  The facts are that the world hasn't seen a pandemic like this in over a century.  Nobody alive will have any sort of useable advice.

I look at the fucking Trumpist militias gathering on the Capitol building in Lansing protesting mask wearing (to prevent droplets from spreading; droplets which carry the Coronavirus to others), and wonder how they'd react to mandatory power outages during World War II, as detailed in this memoir.

Wash your hands, wear your mask, and please be mindful and careful.  100% compliance from 100% of people is not necessarily what we need.  Slip-ups are okay.  What we need is most of the people to do the best that they can until we're out of this mess.  We need diligence and a collective effort - something which stands in direct contention with our American individualism.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Eddie Bentz Bank Robbery

Prohibition is one of the most storied periods in American history. Urban myths and legends abound nationwide, with tales of folk heroes like Al Capone, Babyface Nelson, and John Dillinger. Tall tales are woven around organized crime, wild bootleggers, underground saloons, and well-dressed gangsters. There's something uniquely American about the DIY ethos of taking matters into your own hands, making illegal alcohol, and selling it through clandestine channels; stickin' it to the man like those in the illegal alcohol industry did. These stories are immortalized in movies like The Road To Perdition and Public Enemies, as well as TV series like HBO's Boardwalk Empire and, well, PBS's Prohibition. Many lakeshore towns in Western Michigan have tales of organized crime and bootlegging. Easy access to Lake Michigan meant that bootleggers had easy access to boat routes, safely out of reach of authorities. Booze was funneled in from Canada, then taken by boat to cities all aro...

XFinity Sucks. Or, Why I'm Excited For Holland BPW Fiber To Come Through Our Neighborhood

 The whole thing started in October - we hit the data cap for our XFinity plan in 2 or 3 days. I didn't know we had a data cap on our XFinity plan, so I was befuddled. Problem is, you can't just call XFinity, you must escalate your ticket up their chain of command: Start with their AI chatbot, escalate to a human typing on the other end of the chatroom, get transferred to an AI phone operator, escalate that to any number of human phone operators. Somewhere in that initial escalation, they discovered that we weren't on an actual plan from them, and the services we had weren't even offered by them anymore - our account had slipped through the cracks. Their "solution" to the massive data leak was to give sell us the premium tier service with no data cap...which didn't actually solve anything, it just passed the buck down the road. By October 6 or 7, we had blown through another terrabyte of data, so I reached out to Customer Service agai...

The Cedar Swamp Village

Holland has only been a settled city for a little over 170 years. But, it's got a dense, unique history. I took an interest in local history during my college years at Northern Michigan University, and was able to take that interest back home after graduation. Recently, I began researching for this blog, and hanging out at the library, poring through the Local History section. I found an old, forboding looking book, entitled Memorials Of The Grand River Valley, flipped open to a seemingly random page, and read the passage "The Indian village, near the southeastern limits of the city,w as also a prominent landing-place. The log-houses, built by the Indians, were of great service to the newly arrived immigrants; and, as it appears, there never has been any trouble between the Red man and the Dutchman." This piqued my interest, as I live near the southeastern limits of Holland. Was there an Indian village in my own neighborhood that history forgot? Memorials ad...