Just that dedicated to protecting life

My performing group gave a concert Saturday evening, the first of four before Christmas. This was our first concert in front of a live audience in two years. All of the performers and all of the audience wore masks. Of course, much of it was Christmas music. It went well and our audience told us how much they appreciated hearing live music. My Sunday movie was Scenes from an Empty Church. It is the story of two Catholic priests in a church under lockdown at the start of the pandemic. Since parishoners are not allowed in the building the two men have little to do. And one of them is paranoid about the virus. When I heard about the movie and saw the trailer I thought the movie was about how the priests figured out how to provide all sorts of services for their neighborhood. Well, not exactly. A friend of Father Andrew wants to visit. Soon they figure out how to allow people to come in to pray and to give confession. So the story is about how people are handling life with the virus, how to understand and deal with an upended world. I downloaded Michigan’s COVID data as of December 3. This past week there was a day with 11,189 new cases. Yes, a scary number that is 32% above the peaks of under 8400 last April and November a year ago. However, I suspect much of that is a recording artifact because four days before – I’m sure it was Thanksgiving Day – recorded only 1837 cases in that day. I suspect both numbers will be revised. From two weeks ago to six days ago (after which the data hasn’t been fully posted yet) the deaths per day have been in the range of 67-95. On Friday a high school senior I know came to do some yard cleanup to earn a bit for his college fund. I was surprised he said he would be there before 2:30. I thought he didn’t get out of school until 3:00. When he arrived he explained. His school was closed for the day, but not because of COVID. After the school shooting in Oxford, Michigan a few days before there have been dozens of copycat prank threats to high schools in Michigan. School officials, police, and the FBI have been stretched way thin trying to track down each threat. Many schools closed out of precaution. The day before at my young friend’s school rumors were flying fast from phone to phone and by the middle of the school day half the students had left. My friend said he had received more than one messages saying, “Dude! Get Out! Now!” It was a tense day. So the next day the school closed. We are traumatizing our kids. In response to that shooting Michael Harriot tweeted:

Remember: Guns don’t kill people The cowards hiding behind thoughts, prayers, gun manufacturers & a 200-yr-old sentence written by bitch-ass white boys who needed muskets to stop their throats from being slit by the Africans they enslaved…THAT’S who kills people …Using guns.

A couple days ago I wrote about a woman who filed a complaint to get books banned under Tennessee’s new law banning teaching Critical Race Theory. That prompted Harriot to tweet:

They’ll NEVER allow their kids to learn what MLK REALLY stood for. If he came back today & ONLY said the 5 quotes they cherrypick & regurgitate, they’d shoot him in the face again. It’s not that they love the distorted, whitewashed version of MLK… They love the dead version.

One more from Harriot:

We shouldn’t teach kids how the gov’t killed leaders of protest movements & slaughtered infants because of their race. They shouldn’t learn about historical figures just because of the circumstances of their birth Cancel all Christmas displays in schools Technically, it’s CRT

Also referring to the Oxford school shooting and its original count of the dead (one later died in hospital) Fred Wellman tweeted:

You know what didn’t murder 3 children today? Critical Race Theory.

beguiling bus bug tweeted, though I don’t think “love” is the right word:

i love how the "fight for $15" has been going on for so long $15/hr isn't even remotely a livable wage anymore and the federal minimum wage is still like $7

To check is stats one will need to scroll down a ways. Hunter of Daily Kos discussed the situation of COVID patients showing up at hospital emergency rooms and their family demanding they be treated with horse dewormer, one of the fake cures promoted by the anti-vax crowd. And when the doctors and nurses refuse the family gets mad, threatening legal action or calling on the Republican state Attorney General to harass the hospital. Which leads to a question: If you were going to reject the treatment the staff thinks is appropriate, why come to the hospital? Hunter wrote:

All I can propose is that hospitals just leave out a basket of horse dewormers in the emergency room lobby. Want to be treated by medical professionals? Sign your name and take a seat. Want to get the treatment you saw posted on Facebook, the one all your archconservative pandemic disbeliever friends say is the Real Deal, For Sure This Time? Grab a tube and leave us alone. Our health care system is already a dystopian hellscape, it's not hard to imagine us adding this one to the mix. ... If there's just a basket of farm supplies at the hospital entrance with no instructions and no treatment implied, though, maybe that would take everybody's stress levels down a few notches. Reducing the potential for patient-on-doctor violence is nothing to cough at, you know.

Hunter included humorous dialogue of how such a scenario might play out in the emergency room. Mark Sumner of Kos reported at the request of Gov. Mike Parson, the Missouri Department of Health analyzed the infection and death rates in counties that implemented mask mandates compared to the rest of the state. The analysis showed that masks work very well. Sumner included one of the graphs from the report. As is done by many Republican governors, Parson received the report – and buried it. The Missouri Independent had to invoke the state’s Sunshine Law to get a copy. Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos, quoted some late night commentary. Here’s one of them.

It looks very likely that Roe v. Wade will soon be overturned. The truth is, this is the culmination of a 50-year plan for the conservative movement to reshape the courts for this very purpose. Say what you want about it, but you gotta admit the conservative movement is just that dedicated to protecting life. I mean, not protecting life from coronavirus. Or school shootings. Or lack of health care. Or climate change. Or poverty. Or homelessness. Or… —Trevor Noah