By DEXTER DUGGAN
All those bustling, shoving, aggravating crowds we don’t see much of anymore on urban sidewalks and suburban freeways are starting to look pretty good as we reminisce in their absence. Oh, for us social animals to be among our familiar herds once again.
As singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell musically lamented in the 1970s, you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.
We may not appreciate what’s right in our faces because of its excessive familiarity, but soon regret its slipping away. A noisy household can be unbearable until it’s empty-nester time. This isn’t the first global pandemic, but the first in history when it came so suddenly against everyone’s freedom, and we all could see the vacuum everywhere via electronics.
The blessing of crowds wasn’t only Donald Trump’s campaign life blood but also many other people’s in their daily routine — although maybe not for wan, reclusive Democrat Joe Biden down in his basement who fancies he deserves to be at the top of the heap, with the job awarded to him on a platter.
A hundred years from now, assuming God doesn’t call “Curtains” sooner, people may look back at us with admiration, or at least curiosity, as some folks do now about those who survived the 1940s London bombings from the German National Socialists. Or the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Or name your swoon.
The 2020 coronavirus seriously upset immediate and longer-range plans all over, some irreversibly, but everyone’s unexpected turn in life reminded that the future isn’t guaranteed. The surprise is enacted each day on an individual scale in hospital emergency rooms, for some sufferers worse than others.
Decades ago when I worked on the weekend night newspaper police beat, I went over to a robbery call at a liquor store shortly before the 1 a.m. closing. The clerk had been shot through the drive-up window then rushed to the hospital, so I headed to the ER.
His quiet body was on a gurney behind a half-open curtain, shirt quite open and chest wound very visible, the watch still ticking on his wrist. He and I shared the moment alone; nothing more doctors could do.
He probably looked at that watch a half-hour past and figured his shift soon would be over, just before he surprisingly was, hurled into eternity. In a flash, any passing question he ever may have entertained about the next world was answered.
Or there was the time my team leader at a major financial investment company chatted with me a bit about my aging mother at an assisted-living home. He, about age 34, wanted to benefit from my experiences because he soon would be assuming some care responsibilities for his own aunt. As it turned out, he was dead a month before my Mom. She due to age, he because of an undiscovered aneurysm.
As a note for those who doubt the afterlife: His girlfriend, who was with him in the hospital room when he departed, said it was like Rob wasn’t there on the bed anymore — even though his body was just where it had been a few moments earlier.
A brain aneurysm took my Dad away at age 52 when I was 12, my sister 10, and Mom left alone at age 51. Theirs was a late marriage. His Dad had been murdered as a Chattanooga policeman.
This isn’t to be morbid, but only to recognize that not everyone attains happy retirement at a Southern senior-living community. And even if they do get that far, their worries likely haven’t completely evaporated. Lay not up your treasures on Earth.
We’re not being super-generous as Christians when we hope everyone gets to Heaven. That’s no less than the desire of God Himself. But He plainly warned there are rules to observe for getting there, ten, as a matter of fact.
When He said don’t be judgmental, He meant He alone has the full knowledge of why people act as they do, not that we’re forbidden to draw conclusions about the putative Catholic who tortures puppies on Main Street, who drives drunk every night, or the elderly bad Catholics like Nancy Pelosi and Dementia Joe Biden who do their most to have the most preborn babies mangled to death.
Realistic language may sound harsh, but it’s no less real. And future realities eventually arrive.
Probably everyone who was more than a few years out of the womb vividly remembers “Y2K,” the headline encapsulation for the feared collapse of the world’s computer systems as the year 2000 arrived. The anxiety was over computers that used only two digits instead of four for the year potentially falling into havoc as they read “00” to mean 1900 instead of 2000.
New Year’s Day 2000 was a Saturday, and I remember my aforementioned financial company having a large early morning crew on hand instead of the usual smaller weekend number. We didn’t know what we and our investors would face, although the news coming in from the other side of the world, where the day was farther advanced, seemed encouraging, with no computer disasters there yet.
About 50 of us in one group stood around for one rather tense briefing, as if we might be flying off for combat. That was just over a 20 full years ago.
Or 9/11, almost a full 19 years in the past. Who except a small child doesn’t recall that time, but a baby born then is already in college, or maybe already graduated from the ivy halls if intellectually precocious.
I was about to wash up at around 6 a.m. Arizona time (9 a.m. Eastern) for an appointment miles away when the radio in the bathroom brought puzzling news of a jetliner that didn’t even seem to have seen where it was going on a sunny morning right in Manhattan. I ran out to the living room to turn on TV, which, strangely, had a feed from the British Broadcasting Corp. of the burning New York first tower.
When the second jetliner flew into the other tower, everyone knew this was no accident.
Those of us who were about 40 years of age at those vividly recalled times are already 60. Those who were 60 are, if they’ve long-lived, 80. Those who were 80 are, simply actuarially speaking and with no harm intended, likely dead.
The Democratic Party 20 years ago said it was for rare abortion. The Democratic Party now can’t get enough of it. Biden and Pelosi have drunk that witches’ potion.
Joe Biden turns 78 later this year and is showing the effects of age that come to many people if they last long enough, and probably unsuitable to command the White House. Nancy Pelosi just turned an elderly 80 and looks great eating her gourmet ice cream in self-isolation. My Mom was in very good shape until her health declined rather quickly in her last few years and she died.
Probably Biden, Pelosi, you and I recall Y2K and 9/11 as not long ago at all. But just go that much further into the future and many folks of their generation by then likely will be gone to a reward either good or ill. All the ludicrous left-wing laudatory New York Times editorials saved in their scrapbooks won’t last one second in the fires of a blast furnace, if they happen to open their eyes to such an environment in the next world.
We profoundly hope they don’t, but they have to be realistic about what they’re doing to their eternal — which means, like, forever and forever — fates, and where they need to change right now.
Meanwhile, people around the world were suffering the effects of a pandemic colored by all sorts of political implications, as everything else seems to be in these days of an unashamedly activist dominant media. Here was a dangerous disease, but was everyone still well to be driven off the edge in the name of protection, manipulated by a government fist?
Cooped up, not everyone’s mind and body are built to live as if serving aboard a submarine. Aren’t we all pretty much feeling the effects of it?
Strangely, my recent life has been a precursor of others’. I had less access to the Eucharist beginning last November because of my medical confinement for a serious back injury, then I was more restricted to home after the physical-therapy center released me in January. Not so long before the pandemic lockdown began.
I’ll let you readers know if I have some significant new change so you can get prepared to live that way, too, I say but not sardonically.
Would the swamp critters want the stock market to be crashed until, say, just after a Democrat election victory in November? After which time, the new Democrat tax-and-regulation burdens would drive us back to Obama stagnation days again anyway.
(By the way, a stock market that has to be kept happy with trillions in government emergency spending, with money that actually isn’t there, surely isn’t delivering a sound economy.)
Would not mandatorily self-isolated people lose their routine immunity to disease if their bodies forgot how to ward off the microbes of daily contact away from home? What if production and supply chains actually start to collapse because of a reduced workforce and reduced demand, such as — just one example — for gasoline? Where have the drivers gone?
I think it’s swell to drive along hardly impeded, as if every day were Sunday afternoon. I find that I needn’t calculate having to spend 20 minutes getting to a destination when, these days, it’s only 10 minutes away. But I’m not going to go the wacko environmentalist route of enthusing that we’re going back to pristine nature. Urban areas mean some inconvenience, but it’s the price we pay for living in Century 21 AD.
At Biden’s Side
On another front, faithful liberal Democrat Tara Reade was among the latest to learn the lesson that she’s dirt with the Dem Party if she gets out of line. Apparently she thought her sexual-assault accusation against Biden, who had a reputation as a pawing oaf before he had one for dementia, would be taken seriously, but she was so rebuffed that she reportedly said she wouldn’t vote for a Democrat on the national level.
Moreover, she seemed aghast that Hillary Clinton, well known for covering up for Bill’s sexual depredations as the previous head of the Party of Women, now came to grabby Biden’s side to endorse his presidential candidacy.
The Washington Examiner quoted Reade on April 28: “I do not support Donald Trump, nor will I vote for him ever. However, that said, I am no longer a Democrat.” Reade complained that big-media interviewers avoided even mentioning her accusation when interviewing Biden.
The Examiner reported: “Reade says she will no longer support either party in national elections because of how her allegations have been handled by the ‘corporate press’ and Biden’s campaign.”
It was an approach some Democrats and Bernie Sanders supporters took in 2016 who couldn’t accept Trump but found the corrupt presidential nominee Hillary repellent, too.
A few months ago, the goofy Biden was written off until he showed he could consolidate enough votes to jump ahead in the Dem primaries, sometimes attributed to black voters. As awful as he seemed, he became the candidate of choice of the establishment. We’ll see how well that works out for blacks if Planned Parenthood pal Biden becomes president.
That would mean more government-funded abortion clinics, which are drawn to minority neighborhoods like a magnet, or maggot. That’s another weird trade-off Dem leadership long ago made. More black voters being born would seem a good thing in Dems’ minds, except abortionists get priority, which means blacks have long gotten the Tara Reade “You’re dirt” treatment with a wink.
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