Jerome Christenson: Church of Fox; Church of Fauci | Columnists | lacrossetribune.com - La Crosse Tribune
Is anybody out there not sick of COVID?
Is anyone out there not tired of trying to identify folks from the eyes up? Anyone not tired of struggling to decipher mask-muffled voices? Anybody not ready for an end to the daily infection reports? Hospital stats? Body counts?
Is anybody out there not sick of COVID?
Yeah, didn't think so.
It's been two years since we started hearing about this weird bat flu from China. To start with, it didn't sound like much — nothing like ebola or the Black Death. Certainly not something that was of much concern to us over here. For certain nothing the Mayo Clinic couldn't handle.
Turns out we were wrong about that.
That scared the bejeezus out of us — at first. We locked down, masked up, stayed home and stayed apart. Still the hospital rooms filled up, gravediggers started putting in overtime and across the country people worried about running out of toilet paper.
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And every time it seemed things were getting better, they'd get worse. We got a vaccine and we got delta. We got boosted and we got omicron.
What's next?
Who knows. But we're sick of it. Been sick of it for a long time … at least it seems like a long time. Sick of it to the point where some folks have just given up, and a lot of others are just about ready to.
I can understand that. After two years of doing what we're told what to do to send the virus back to oblivion the virus is still headline news. Folks are getting fed up. Frustrated.
The stress is real, and personal. It's there in the decision to stay home rather than spend another evening trying to watch a performance through glasses befogged by breathing through a mask. It's there when you scuttle back to the car to scrounge a forgotten face covering. It's there when you're facing one too many more Zoom sessions.
Yeah, we're really sick of COVID. Trouble is, COVID is still making us sick. Some, unfortunately, sicker than others.
Americans aren't patient people. We're the folks who came up with instant coffee, fast food, Tang, and the microwave. And if, as a nation, we can't wait three minutes for a three-minute egg who should be surprised that we don't react well when told to put our lives on hold for another three weeks, much less, three months?
P.T. Barnum was thinking of his American audience when he declared, "There's a sucker born every minute," and it seems that birth rate keeps increasing the longer the pandemic lingers on. Folks who find the prescriptions of the epidemiologists, virologists and public health experts too bitter to swallow don't lack for snake oil vendors pitching a variety of nostrums — political, conspiritorical, and pseudo-scientifical — alternatives to harsh reality. The more far-fetched, it seems, the better.
At first thought, that seems odd. In a world shaped by science and technology, how could so many reject reason, ignore evidence and follow the wizard down the yellow brick road?
Perhaps the reason lies in our science, our technology itself. Sixty years ago, science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke postulated: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." We live in a day when we carry computers in our shirt pockets, have autos that literally tell us where to go, and when not a one of us can adequately explain how in the devil any of this actually works. Our lives become as dependent on performing actions and rituals no less mystical and arcane than the rattles and incantations of a paleolithic shaman. When so much of life is shrouded in techno-magic and mystery, one set of explanations easily becomes plausible as another — and the Church of Fox faces off against the Church of Fauci.
Two sides in an unholy war. A war where we are in danger of losing sight of the enemy — an invisible virus.
We need to fight COVID, not each other.
Let's try to remember that.
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