Disease, unrest, injustice, economic upheaval, and frustration leading to violence… and that was just at my cousin’s bar mitzvah!
Every morning, we wake to some bizarro version of Groundhog Day with the same news repeated, only with different numbers inserted in the blank spaces. How long can this go on? And how is it possible?
Throughout the previous decade, I wrote a weekly newspaper column in which I reported advancements in genetic manipulation, consumer space expeditions, self-driving cars, virtual housemates (Siri/Alexa) that maliciously send recordings of your personal conversations to friends behind your back (just like some REAL housemates) and robotic exoskeletons that actually allow people with spinal cord injuries to walk again (or for the first time).
These are amazing achievements! The human race should be beaming with pride. Screw you, Venus and Mars! We’re evolving and when we’re done f-ing up this planet, be ready because we are coming for yours!
We are now so advanced that we can spot a burgeoning pandemic from a mile away, and for the first time in history, rally the entire global scientific community to pool their greatest intellectual resources and leap into action. We are talking about the sum total of every brilliant mind the folks at NobelPrize.org have been lauding for decades, only now with internet access to every up-to-the-minute medical finding on earth at their literal fingertips, and the very best solution they offer is “Stay home”, “Wear a mask”, and “Stay away from everybody”… IN NINE MONTHS!
To put this into perspective, my great grandparents local doctor-slash-goat breeder’s credentials were questionable, and some of his sagest advice was to apply toothpaste to your hemorrhoids, at a time when the average life expectancy was about 38 years. And yet, these people could create a human life in that same nine-month time frame, and repeat the process like 9 or 10 times. Just saying.
Oh, the academic elitism of the scientific community that scoff at, and shame those of us who struggle to understand, but offer no illumination. Hey, the shoemaker makes shoes. We don’t give her the keys to the pharmacy because that’s not her thing. When she diagnoses the state of your heel and tells you to come back Tuesday, you can best believe they’ll be ready on Tuesday. But schedule a meeting with your doctor three months ahead of time and you’ll still find yourself waiting for two hours. And do you know why? Because during internship, they were allotted about 27 hours of sleep in a year and a half, and now as they make the final payments to their student loan at age 44, they just don’t really feel like doing the work anymore.
So hey, forgive me if I’m not intimately familiar with the complex permutations of RNA viruses or viridae or virii, but some of us are just happy to HAVE a job they can actually do. But perhaps you nice folks at the NIH, Mayo, Swiss FIT, Kyoto, etc. could just pick up the pace and offer us something, anything really, just a little better than “Cease all human interaction”. Would you? Great! See you at Mardi Gras.
Very funny but unfortunately true.