Day 97 You Can Lead A Horse to Water; and, Learning to Think

Usually, illogic presented as logic makes me laugh. Like this from one of my Mex Mysteries. Gareth, Mex’s assistant, is speaking, “We’re not going to decide this today, Miss Mex.” High femme, intuitive investigator Mex says, “Why not?” His solemn answer: “It’s matinee day.” They laugh. I smile as I type.                   

However, Mike Pence has just added insult to injury on a call to state governors. “We wouldn’t have these ‘intermittent’ spikes if we weren’t testing so much.” What?! The deep-thinking Philosopher-in-Chief added, “If we stop testing right now, we’d have very few cases, if any.” My response to that was a playground couplet: Liars, liars everywhere, When will we learn to think?

“Most Coronavirus Tests Cost About $100. Why Did One Cost $2,315? U.S. health care prices are unregulated, opaque and unpredictable.” Ya think? “The government does not regulate health care prices.” Surprise, surprise. There was a story yesterday of a woman who had recovered from Covid-19 after three weeks in a hospital, mostly in a coma. She received the first of many invoices in the amount of $401,885.57. The others only raised the tab.

Um, there’s a worldwide pandemic. At the risk of being repetitious, uh, all over the world. This means, insurers, that no one is safe until we are all safe. Besides, hospitals received upwards of one billion dollars so that this exact thing wouldn’t happen. Greedy, greedy everywhere, When will be learn to think?

Incarceration activists have been writing, talking, and screeching about the path of coronavirus in prisons for months. “By now, the five largest known clusters of the virus in the United States are not inside nursing homes or meatpacking plants, but inside corrections institutions. ... And the risk of more cases appears imminent: The swift growth in virus cases behind bars comes as demonstrators arrested during large protests against police brutality in recent weeks have often been placed in crowded holding cells in local jails that were already battling virus outbreaks.”

“Prison deaths tied to the virus have seen a 73 percent increase since mid-May.” We knew this was coming. We’ve known for months. Some responsible administrators lobbied for the successful release of nearly-paroled, nonviolent persons, and persons who were already at risk because of their own health histories. Those released have been a bare minimum. The responses of companies that manage these institutions has been abysmal. Punish, punish everywhere, When will we learn to think?

“Covid-19 Doctors: Fatigued, Mourning and Bracing for More” writes critical care doctor Daniela J. Lamas. Of course they are. The few voices of reason that get through the media clatter on any given day have been predicting this for weeks. “Nearly 1,000 Americans continue to die every day from this virus, while others dance in crowded clubs and refuse to wear masks in public places.”

Dr. Lamas’ most chilling words were these two: “It continues.”

It does. It will. Until there’s a vaccine—created, tested, approved, manufactured, distributed, and given to everyone. All 7.8 billion persons on this planet. Every one of us.

Michelle Cottle is a member of the Editorial Board of The New York Times. She writes compellingly, and usually, dismissively, of the squatter in The Oval Office. Her title this morning is “Ask Not What President Trump Can Do for You.”

Some of us, the thinkers among us, have already stopped asking.

“Once again, President Trump is taking heat for treating the presidency like a branding exercise. This time, instead of brandishing a Bible he doesn’t read next to a church he doesn’t attend, ...”

A beloved friend sent me a picture of St. Michael’s Parish—I know not where—with signage blaring. “Holding up a calculus book does not make you a mathematician.” Cough.

Ms. Cottle’s sentence continues, “... the president is resuming huge, made-for-TV campaign rallies. The first is set for Saturday in Tulsa, Okla. It will take place in a 19,000-seat arena that, in deference to the coronavirus pandemic that’s still raging, had canceled all other events through the end of July.”

You will recall that his campaign had originally scheduled the rally for Juneteenth, a day celebrated in Black communities country-wide to commemorate the end of slavery. Insensitive much? Disconnected from the moment? Or perhaps connected only to a small segment of the populace he purports to represent?

“For Trump’s triumphal return, his campaign has decided that no social distancing is required. He wants this to be a spectacle, packed with as much noisy adoration as possible. But whatever risks those attending might incur, Team Trump is taking steps to ensure that it bears none. All rally attendees must sign a liability waiver holding the campaign legally blameless in the event that people subsequently fall sick. Or drop dead.”

I am appalled. Denying the reality that Covid-19 is with us to stay until we have a vaccine, and lawyering up over Covid-19 at the same time? What sort of sickness allows for this kind of sleight-of-hand?

Prestidigitation notwithstanding, the Reality-Star-in-Chief is not the only one. Plenty of people have this parallel virus. It’s a virus that prevents clear thinking by keeping us focused outward, and making sure we never look within.

The same paradox [such a benign, usually, intriguing word], perhaps satanic paradox, was extant in childrearing when I was growing up. “Do as I say, not as I do.” I remember a distinct moment of my upbringing, hearing the sound of ice in an Old Fashioned glass, and deciding I hated it. I grew up amongst raging alcoholics.

That rally, scheduled for this Saturday, in a city wherein the top health official, stating that cases are already spiking, and not intermittently, begged the campaign to postpone. Ms. Cottle asks, “But what is the health of his followers to Mr. Trump compared with a mass show of affection—especially after he has endured so many sad weeks without such affirmation?”

The question itself, though apt, is obscene. Poor baby. I know babies who are more grown-up.

The rally itself, though precedent, is blatant, pornographic lack of care.

Here’s another question: Do those who so eagerly sign such a liability waiver in order to be in the presence of the Perpetrator-in-Chief value their own health, and that of their families, so little?

THERE’S A BLESSED PANDEMIC, TEAM TRUMP. Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot. For real.

And because the Third-Grader-in-Chief needs to feel loved, you’re going to risk your LIVES?!?!? [Apologies to all Third Graders everywhere. For heaven’s sake, I know third graders who are smarter than these imbeciles.]

Now, I, like Ms. Cottle, get it. The Presidency is nothing if not performative. Staging, as any theatre person will tell you, is important. “It is important to stress that there is nothing wrong with presidential photo ops per se.” She’s right, there’s not.

But. Full stop.

“But, on the whole, presidential theater is a powerful tool of the trade, one that Mr. Trump should understand better than most. He is, after all, a former reality TV star, long obsessed with image and ratings. Three-plus years into office, however, he rarely (if ever) aims for anything more than making himself look important.”

Okay. I guess. Presidents are important, even Idjit ones. [True confessions: It galls me, sometimes, even to offer the respect implicit in the term ‘Mr. Trump.’ He’s no mister, he’s an abomination and his demeanor and behavior are a perversion of what The White House symbolizes.] “While such performances carried a whiff of Il Duce, most did not put the public at direct risk. The same cannot be said of Mr. Trump’s public relations stunts of late.”

I won’t take us through the biblical photo-op or the West Point speech again. Now, though, the stakes are ratcheted even higher. “Now Mr. Trump is thinking even bigger—and demanding greater risk from his most faithful followers. From a public health standpoint, resuming large, crowded, indoor rallies is madness. But the president is not content simply to endanger the lives of his supporters. He is demanding they sign away their rights for the privilege.”

I’m not a lawyer, although I’ve lost track of the times I’ve been accused of being one, but is it even legal to insist upon a broad-reaching liability waiver for the right to publicly assemble? The Supreme Court just made a magical, euphoric left turn—see tomorrow’s post. I wonder what The Supremes would have to say about this particular slimy bit of legal legerdemain?

Yesterday, Jon Stewart talked about confusing symbolism with reality. I want to explore that idea more fully. The reason I do is because my husband observed casually to me that I don’t generally recognize a difference between the two. He’s right.

This is what it is to be a metaphysician. To think, really, beyond the physical, which is what the etymology of the word says it means.

So if reality is physical, symbolism—or what that reality means—is metaphysical in my book.

Reality, these days, is having a rough patch, wouldn’t you say?

Worldwide pandemic. Everyone at risk.
Economic flatline. Most everyone at risk.
Police brutality. Certain folk at risk.
Systemic racism. Certain folk at risk.

Do these four realities have anything in common? I think they do, but it takes the ability to discern through the constant cacophony of the noise and distractions to get to what’s really going on, and that, in itself, requires the ability to think separately from the crowd. That ability to think is what’s in such short supply right now because we, like the Perversion in the Oval, have learned to be too outwardly focused even to know what we ourselves think.

Consider this little story: “A few hours after the Manhattan district attorney announced he would not prosecute some of the protesters who had been arrested during demonstrations against police brutality, the Police Department sent him a message: All the officers assigned to his office would be pulled off the job to help with crowd control. The district attorneys in the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens made similar decisions and received the same news. Police Commissioner Dermot F. Shea said on Friday that the timing was unrelated to the prosecutors’ decisions. Resources were pulled from the entire department to cover the protests, he said.”

A child could tell you that the timing was crystalline precise. If you X, then we’ll Y. Pure recess revenge. And what is this playground tactic based on? Fear. Well, fear of risk.

Here’s another, a post-mortem, if you will: ““What [Amy Cooper] did was tap into a deep vein of racial bias,” [Christian] Cooper added. “And it is that deep vein of racial bias that keeps cropping up that led to much more serious events and much more serious repercussions than my little dust-up with Amy Cooper—the murder of George Floyd, the murder of Ahmaud Arbery, and before that Amadou Diallo and Patrick Dorismond and Eric Garner and Tamir Rice.”

He added, “‘There are certain dark societal impulses that she, as a white woman, facing in a conflict with a black man, that she thought she could marshal to her advantage,’ Mr. Cooper said. ‘She went there.’”

Amy Cooper claimed risk where there wasn’t any vulnerability.

Another story, “A 19-year-old Black Lives Matter activist whose disappearance this month led to a desperate search after she sent a series of tweets describing a sexual assault has been found dead in Tallahassee, Fla., the police said Monday. The activist, Oluwatoyin Salau, was one of two women whose bodies were discovered in an area southeast of the city on Saturday evening, the police said. Both the deaths were being investigated as homicides.”

Here there were both risk and vulnerability, and Ms. Salau and Victoria Sims paid for both with their lives.

Go back to my list above. You can see there’s risk, and then there’s risk, right?

What is fear of risk a symbol of? Vulnerability.

Now we can see a spectrum of vulnerability. We’re all vulnerable to the virus, and most of us to the economic downturn. Some of us are more vulnerable than others to brutality and racism. We need to level the vulnerability playing field. Level it.

Beloved, not to startle you, but, to be alive at all is to be vulnerable. Life itself is a risk.

Once we know that, really know it, and if we’ll really think about it, we can no longer deny its factual validity, we find a lot more courage to think for ourselves.

Instead, we are told that if we don’t look at the clouds, it’s not raining, even if our hair and clothes are dripping wet with precipitation. And people are believing it.

It is time to take back our individual right and our individual ability to think, Beloved. When we do, we will recognize effortlessly our shared, and equal, vulnerability, and God willing, we will finally be able to do the right thing.

Dr. Susan Corso is a metaphysician and medical intuitive with a private counseling practice for more than 35 years. She has written too many books to list here. Her website is www.susancorso.com  

© Dr. Susan Corso 2020 All rights reserved

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