Cuomo's noontime pronouncements are sometimes entertaining, sometimes hilarious and almost always misleading. Today he was downright scary.
He was talking about the "demonstrations" in the city. He said you didn't have to be either on the side of the demonstrators or on the side of the police; you could be on both sides. He said we should support the demonstrators because they were expressing their right to be heard, and also the police because they were trying to do their job and deserved support. So far, so good.
Then, without a hint of humility but plenty of hubris, he said we had to change people's attitudes. We had to get people to have "societal awareness." He asked can you "change behaviour to respect one another?" "Yes," he sayid emphatically, because we just did it. We successfully got them to stay home and wear masks! He believes that he can - and will - change society to fit his vision of what's right, not by persuading people but rather by compelling them to think and act as he orders them to.
This is scary stuff.
My despondence took a bit of a turn for the better this afternoon. First I got a haircut from a barber who believes all these coronavirus rules are hogwash. I told her about the latest CDC data and she said a sixth grader could have figured out how all this was going to turn out from the beginning: many old people would die and the rest of us would be okay. It's not as if coronavirus is some sort of never before seen scourge that is going to eat you alive.
Then I went to the grocery store. The people in front of me at the checkout counter (obviously New Yorkers) were protected to the nines: masks, shields, wipes, the whole nine yards. The checkout woman and I grinned at each other, and when the New Yorkers were gone I said their chances of dyimg from coronoavirus were less than their chances of being run over and killed in the parking lot. She chuckled and commented about how all day long she had to pretend that lowering her mask was tantamount to mass murder.
So maybe there's hope. I hope the sheep don't carry the day any more than they have already.
As we saw more of the symptoms of coronavirus it dawned on us that Katie and I had the virus in February, along with much of the UCSC student population while riding the sardine can superspreader transit bus fleet. One of the bus drivers died. Katie turned pink, but not purple, and I got pneumonia and was home for a week coughing. That was so early that PCR tests were not available, and by now we would not even show antibodies, but the puzzle pieces fit together.
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