Elon
Should our elites be in charge? Elon Musk tweeted that "the coronavirus panic is dumb." Elon also told his workers that they're more likely to die in a car crash which, to be fair, might be a reasonable statement if his accident-prone "self-driving" Teslas were more popular.
Car accidents, unlike pandemics, can't multiply exponentially. At least, not today. But it's theoretically easy to hack networked and connected cars, perhaps even on a viral scale. That could turn them into a herd of sorts, a collectively-manipulated killing machine.
But one thing would surely be a comfort to individualists everywhere. Most of the passengers would die the way Americans have always preferred their driving experiences: one by one, alone.
Flashback
An historical dispatch from the "we're all in this together" archives: The Rev. Cotton Mather tried to introduce immunization during the Boston smallpox epidemic of 1721, but the medical and economic establishment of his day rejected it. Mather didn't get the idea from God or prayer. He got it from one of the enslaved people in his household, Onesimus, who told him had been cured of the disease through inoculation back home in Africa.
Not that Mather trusted Onesimus. Mather wrote in his diary that the man "proves wicked and grows Useless, Froward (ungovernable), and Immorigerous (rebellious)" all eminently reasonable responses to his circumstances. Onesimus never resorted to violence, as far as we know, although it was used repeatedly against him. The same couldn't be said of Mather's fellow whites, one of whom threw a bomb through his window to protest his immunization plan.
Undeterred, Mather then studied the subject and learned of successful immunization programs in Turkey and China as well as Africa. Most of Boston's elites found it impossible to accept the idea that new healing techniques could come from such "dark" places.
And so, they died instead.
Reflections of a Wayward Impala
There's only one way to say this, much as I dislike doing it: I am vulnerable because I am older. I am doubly vulnerable because I have a compromised immune system. I am triply vulnerable because I have lung problems and am susceptible to respiratory infection.
In fact, I'm a Triple-Crown winner in the "only" race. I've been working from home for two weeks because of my latest infection, a fact that may have saved me from something worse. It feels like the set-up to a zombie movie, like 28 Days Later or The Walking Dead, where the protagonist wakes up from an illness and everyone else is dead or a monster.
I'll tell you a secret now, one that older adults carry with them every day: We walk with the dead.
Oh, a lot of us don't admit it, not even to ourselves. But once you've reached a certain age, the dead are with you wherever you go. Your parents are dead. Mine both died in the last couple of years. Your aunts and uncles, the ones who nurtured you and reminded you what sanity was when your parents went off the rails? They're dead, too.
"Richard," one aunt said many years ago, "somehow you learned to cope with the stress of your childhood by..." she waved a hand over her head, pantomiming someone escaping into a dream world. She was a great actress and singer, with a highly-disciplined flair for it. She died last year.
"Come back to Earth," she said, all those years ago, laughing. "I mean, Jesus Christ! Meditate or something." Then she snapped her fingers. "Hello! Hello!"
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