No one should travel right now!

 I'm posting this late because I didn't post it when it was fresh, but it makes points about the US health care system and generally callous society. It was written November 24 in a hotel room on my way to Delaware. I did manage to travel almost entirely without human contact. I saw fewer people than I do in a normal week at home, because I was not at my job.

The Covid-19 pandemic rages across the country. Absolutely every public health expert says to stay home and seal up your pod. So what am I doing? I'm driving almost 500 miles to visit my wife where she works for the school year.

I believe public health experts. Living under recommended isolation hasn't been very different from how I normally live. That probably gives me an advantage over the habitually gregarious. But everyday life has still become intensely stressful for anyone who cares about beating this illness.

Contagious illness needs contact to spread. Some pathogens can hitch on inanimate objects to create contact without person-to-person proximity. Think of food borne illnesses and noroviruses. Covid-19 spreads more easily when people are close enough together for long enough to spread respiratory droplets and particles from one to another. It can also spread from surfaces, but we're told that is a minor concern compared to transmission through shared air. Even so, a frequently touched surface like a gas pump nozzle on the busiest travel weekend of the year could infect dozens, especially if its viral load is augmented by numerous infected people glomming onto it in the course of a busy day.

So what the hell am I doing out here? I'm one of the good guys: I masked up fairly early, I avoid group activities, I shop quickly and efficiently and get the hell out of the grocery store. I believe the doctors who say we should take precautions, and the health care providers from nurses on down who warn us that they are getting overloaded, and some of them are dying because people who could be careful haven't been.

The decision to travel was not made lightly or easily. Its roots go back to the late 1990s, when a woman pulled me out of relationship retirement. She was smart and funny and talented and liked what I like and we clicked. We wouldn't find out for a few years that she's also incurably ill.

Isn't that just like something out of a melodramatic movie? Grumpy guy has decided that love is not for him. Old friend shows up and friendship blossoms into love. That's Hallmark enough. The sickness just bumps it up to "oh please" level of cornball tear jerking.

Because we live in America, she's had to go where she can find work that provides insurance. Because it's America, the insurance won't cover the kidney transplant that would give her the best odds to extend her life more than a few years. But at least it covers a lot of the preliminaries and maybe the dialysis until she can no longer work and therefore loses the insurance coverage. Life is cheap, people. Most of us are not worth investing in.

Her numbers are getting worse. The job she took is in a town where she doesn't know anyone, and the pandemic precautions make it very hard for her to get to know anyone. She'd rather be home, but home proved quite infertile for her career. She faces everything by herself while I maintain our home as best I can. A couple of months ago when she asked if I would consider coming down for Thanksgiving I did not hesitate. And I hate traveling at Thanksgiving, especially down through the East Coast Megalopolis, even when a deadly disease isn't rampaging unchecked.

I suppose if I was worth a shit I would make enough money to support us both and keep us together in one place or another.

Think outside the box

Humans appreciate creative solutions to vexing problems. We praise the adventurous souls who "think outside the box." But when the answer works it simply changes the shape and reinforces the structure of the box, because the box is the solid structure of society.

Thinkers outside the box are like space-walking astronauts. They're only useful when they're close to the ship, ministering directly to it. Untethered, they drift into space to die alone.

Successful box-dwellers find something useful to do inside it. It's full of all kinds of functions we have made necessary, requiring leadership and initiative to manage. You need a strong work ethic, and a belief in the shared values that have brought us so far from our primitive roots. Even our fringe dwellers recognize that success is defined by where you are in the box. If you go outside of it, you need to keep your feet planted on the top of it, so that people can still see you, and you can feed off of the box's resources.

At one point, hominid social organization consisted of one big ape who could beat up all the smaller apes. He would enjoy his period of dominance before age caught up with him and a new dominant ape would take the top spot. Evolution happened. Smaller hominids figured out how to defeat pure brawn, and could now exploit it. Aggressive muscle remains as dangerous a power source as a leaky nuclear reactor, but we've grown accustomed to it. It manifests itself in gun violence and domestic abuse and warlike ideologies now. It's the least desirable expression of liberty. But it saturates the structure of the box. All is measured against the box in some way.

There is no escape. Not one that you can survive for long, anyway. Act like you are far outside, by disregarding the norms, and you might as well be surrounded by airless blackness and implacable cold. You're not really outside. You're in the bottom of it, with the broken things and the dirt swept down from the tended levels above you. You are disconnected and seen as useless.

Norms change. Gradually we've come to accept things that had been too disturbing. What sets you apart is not what you are as much as what you do. Superficialities of appearance and behavior matter less. You can then be judged by how well your actions improve life for the box dwellers who matter.

The public good is nothing to sneeze at

People's breath has been weaponized. That's the threat facing us right now. Every time you leave your home, you face the possibility that some perfectly robust looking individual will cough or sneeze or laugh or otherwise exhale forcefully and envelop you in a cloud of microscopic particles that could infect you. Once infected, you will find out how this new disease interacts with your particular genetics and physical condition. Your odds get worse if you are over 60 years of age, but old people have survived with minimal ill effects and young people have died of complications. You just don't know.

In a situation like this, you'd think that adoption of some rudimentary precautions would be universally accepted. But this is America, where disagreement is a matter of principle. We are not the only country so afflicted, but we certainly stand out as one of the most divided and argumentative. It used to be seen as a source of synergy, but it is now -- and really always has been -- indicative of an ongoing war to control the entire country. Are we peaceful or warlike? Do we celebrate our diversity or aspire to be a pure white nation of heteronormative Christians and nothing else?

That's a lot of shit to lay on your trip to the grocery store, but that's where we are. If you go out in public these days, you have to worry not only about all the details of hygiene to avoid accidental contamination, but about the mouth-breathing antagonists who will surround you.

Some places are better than others. Some places are better at different times than others. Manly enclaves like stores where you buy hardware and auto parts are liable to be full of unmasked people forcing you to live at their level of risk tolerance.

People don't understand masks. It's not body armor. It's a condom for your breath. That analogy doesn't hold up perfectly, because a condom guards against infection equally in both directions, when properly used, whereas a mask mostly blocks outgoing breath droplets -- less than perfectly, I admit -- better than it blocks incoming hostile fire from the lung contents of naked-faced freedom fighters who might or might not be actively aggressive on top of their basic selfish, sociopathic unconcern.

I have to go to the grocery store tomorrow. I would also like to pick up a few items at the hardware store, but I don't look forward to wondering how I will be received with my facial covering. This inclines me to choose the store that advertises their precautions as a selling point, rather than one where they obviously don't care.

We all wonder who will turn out to have been right in their approach. You'd think that having the highest infection numbers in the world would have begun to answer that, but the proponents of mass death are counting on the fact that the survivors will get over any grievances once they realize that what's done is done, and that they might as well accept the losses and move on. People are resilient. If you're still capable of enjoying life at all, you'll learn to do it without any friends and family members who succumbed to the plague. Take the hard hit and power through.

Occasionally you hear of a lockdown protester who then got the disease and had a change of heart, but in a country of 330 million people, 80 or 90 thousand dead doesn't distribute corpses widely enough to get the attention of most of us. It's all theoretical. And most people survive, some with few or no symptoms, at least in the short run.

All we've had is the short run. Scientists are studying the problem from every angle, learning as much as they can, but it's a new condition for our species. We don't know long term effects because no one has had a long term yet. Thanks to the rebellious mouth breathers, thousands of us won't get one, either. Who will it be? How much will you care when it's you or someone close to you? Tune in next week, and the week after that, and the week after that, for many, many more weeks, to find out.

If you see something, say nothing

Most people know better than to idealize small town life. For all of the benefits of community support, those are completely revocable in the case of community rejection and censure. Especially for someone in business in a small town, risky assertions are a luxury.

At this point, any comments about anyone’s personal and public pandemic protective measures are off limits. It doesn’t matter if you see grocery clerks licking packages before putting them out, or restaurant staff French-kissing random people in the parking lot. Individual safety is up to individuals. This is a free country. We’re all going to have to do business with each other when the current inconvenience dies down. Gotta look to the future, regardless of who doesn’t get to have one because they proved to be genetically inferior and were culled by this largely trivial illness making the rounds.

In a small town, if enough people take a dislike to you, you're dead. Maybe not literally dead, but shunned. It's not just for colonial times. It's human nature. You don't want to risk it. You're better off to keep your trap shut.

Community standards determine what is risky. Things that might repel one person have a robust following among others. Free speech belongs to the dominant group, not to individuals. To be more precise, free speech has consequences, and those consequences hit harder on minorities and individuals than on the majority point of view. If everyone else jumped off a bridge you might be able to avoid jumping off of it with them, but make sure you stand aside and say nothing against bridge jumping. Protect yourself as best you can. Let the world burn.

You want pathogens with that?

The deli mentioned in an earlier post upped the ante yesterday, when three young members of the staff all trotted out to the parking lot to greet the occupants of two cars that had just pulled in. Close contact included not just stuffing themselves each in turn into the back seat of a compact car with whoever was sitting there, but full-on hugs with others who had emerged from the other vehicle. Then they trotted back into the deli to continue preparing food for public consumption.

Large numbers of their patrons still opt to go inside the tiny space to pick up their orders. For those who want to stay in their cars and have it brought out, one of the plucky huggers will carry the bag out and hand it to you.

With all the businesses that have closed due to recommended best practices, the ones still operating have to advertise their availability. I suggest that the deli use the slogan, "You bet your life we're open!"

When the onslaught of this disease is over we will know who was overreacting. Will the cautious look foolish or will the casual look foolhardy? How much are you willing to bet that we have nothing to worry about?

The fearless

Some people are treating this coronavirus situation like running with the bulls, or jumping off a cliff with a wing suit. It’s just another grand adventure in a world of risk.

Get a grip, people. We’re talking about routine bullshit like going to the grocery store, or putting gas in the car. If I’m going to take stupid risks with my own health and the health of others, I at least want it to be fun, like having unprotected sex for most of the 1970s. I don't want it to be from scratching my nose after touching the door handle at work.

The people facing the real risks are not grooving on it. Have you heard any doctors and nurses say that it's exaggerated?

Bravado is a coping mechanism for some people. That's fine, we all have our ways. Just respect the ways of others as we all try to get through this.

I'm trying to get my nerve up to wear a mask. It's a big step in an image-conscious society. You can maintain distance in your normal garb. You can find excuses to wear gloves in various contexts. But the mask...that's a big move. That makes it real. The weather is too warm to hide it behind a scarf, especially in a store. You'd look weird, muffled in a scarf as you scan the shelves for whatever the hoarders have left. Real casual.

Mask advocates are working on many options. I want something humorous and original. Of course nothing is original, but if I came up with it on my own it's okay if others came up with the same thing. There's no way to look like you're unconcerned when you're wearing something so unusual in our culture. It's a bold statement. You might even call it fearless.

An influx of New Yorkers

Folks around here grumble harsh comments about the arrival of a lot of people from away, who don't usually arrive until the most beautiful part of summer, and leave just as it ends. While most of them come from our neighboring state immediately to the south, I've seen some New York license plates as well, especially around Wolfeboro.

Given that we've been advised to avoid each other for weeks now, due diligence should continue to carry us through. But someone did point out that any infected incomers will put additional strain on our meager health care resources. It's poignant that we've already sold them all of the waterfront and, in some places, let them build gaudy palaces on hillsides and ridgelines. They already monopolize the best of the warm weather. Now they're liable to suck up all of the medical supplies and sicken our front-line medical personnel before most of us get a chance to.

Even the uninfected among them will get to see what it's like to live here during the months that they have not been able to. I remember the late 1980s, when it seemed like every immigrant was a city dweller who had racked up a few quick bucks in the early 1980s surge and was going to go live in the country and have either an inn or a village store. I arrived here in 1987, when this was at its height, like an airplane that had climbed too high and too steeply, and was about to stall and plunge. And so it came to pass. Northern New England went down first in that recession. Part of the blame goes to the economy in general. The rest of the exodus happened after thousands of fantasizing flatlanders got to see just how bugger ugly the place is for months and months.

They'll be going nuts within a couple of weeks, whether they've quarantined themselves or ventured out to mingle with a local population they may believe is untouched and unconcerned. There's nothing to do here.

There are locals who do act as if they are immune, or as if we all have nothing to worry about. Hey, the fatality rate is only 1-2 percent. A very small local deli is supposedly only doing carry-out, but the space is so small that people waiting inside have to take turns inhaling and exhaling, because a full house can't all inflate their chests at once. And the work space is so small that a six foot distance between the staff is utterly impossible. They are not concerned. One of them is the mother of an infant. She still comes to work. This whole thing is overblown. New Yorkers welcome.

Other businesses have shut completely. They did so before the governor's order to close non-essential businesses. The ones that remain open do so with varying degrees of stringent procedure in place.

The response from governments at the state and national level has been abysmal. We needed to be testing wide swaths of the population more than a month ago to determine where the virus was, so it could be contained. Supposedly focusing on minimizing economic disruption has guaranteed massive economic disruption. The general disregard for the welfare of citizens has gone unchallenged for decades. Will that change? The representatives of concentrated wealth hope that a beleaguered citizenry will be so grateful once the mess is over that they will fall into line and continue voting in favor of the plutocracy. At the same time, dismantled environmental protections will make it easier to dump your waste oil down a storm drain and burn a pile of your old tires without any social stigma, so that will make it popular with rank and file voters. No more will someone try to guilt trip us about throwing our trash out the car window whenever we feel like it. Good times are coming! What's a few thousand dead? They'll mostly be people we never even met.

COVID-19: Foraging in a dangerous world

We're still allowed to go out to get food and other necessities, but will you find them?

The nearest grocery store to my house is about seven miles away. It's on my way to work, or home from work, depending on the time of day. It's your typical modern supermarket, complete with pharmacy. On a normal day I would find almost all of what I was looking for.

In these abnormal days, the smart shopper gets there when the doors open. Even then, don't expect to find everything on your list. So then what?

There are other stores in just about every direction, mostly farther away. On social media, people share their reports. Those reports are seen at least by their friends, if not by an unlimited audience. Also, we're told to limit our exposure to other people and public contact points. Personally, I like to limit how much gasoline I use anyway. This is reinforced by the information that gas pump handles are some of the most contaminated surfaces. It was always true, but the new virus appears to be pretty hardy. Anything a lot of people touch is more likely to spread infection.

All this takes place in a buzz of information, some warning of dire risk, some dismissing the concern of millions of people as a panic over nothing.

The designated forager in a household has to decide how far to venture in search of whatever was not available at their first stop. How many door handles is it worth? How often do the workers in this emporium wash their hands and clean their work stations? How much should you worry at all?

Are Americans more self conscious than other nationalities about looking stupid? It seems like a lot of what goes around the internet these days counsels looking cool at all costs. The "be cool" posts mostly minimize those costs, but some of them are now saying, "go ahead and die, you're helping the economy." So we have two strains going: the It's Nothing strain, and the Bleeding Lungs of Courage strain. The most important factor for both of them is that you not look like you were worried when this is all over. There's even a batch of apparently scientific information going around to the effect that the virus isn't as bad as we think, and that it will wind down sooner than later.

The problem with the quest for treasures in the retail wilderness is that the threat is not from visible monsters. It's from that person next to you in the bread aisle, or a spot you missed when disinfecting your shopping cart. It's a random sneeze cloud over a sidewalk that looks deserted by the time you get there. You can't put on your armor and grab your magic sword. You can't zap it with your death ray, dive and roll, and draw a bead on the next bogey coming out of an alley as you pass. At most you might have rubber gloves and a paper mask, which you must throw away as soon as you return to your pod, there to decontaminate before entering. How important was it to go out in the first place, and into every other place that you investigated in your search?

Coronavirus response fails due to ADD

As congressional Democrats maneuver against the GOP to get an effective and supportive response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the current occupant of the Oval Office appears to be losing interest in the whole concept of helping ordinary citizens to survive in the greatest possible numbers. This dovetails nicely with the news that white supremacist, anti-government groups are telling their followers that any of them who get infected with COVID-19 should go cough on Jews and police officers.

The proponents of letting the thing run rampant point to the considerable economic benefits of massive casualties, provided that we waste as little as possible on trying to treat the sick. Ration care. Ration materiel. Focus on the higher economic brackets, where the real value to society lies. Sure, we depend on the lowly worker bees, but there are plenty of them. With a good dose of fear, they'll be more compliant. With a good thinning, there won't be as many of them to whine and vote Democratic. Because the supporters of the current regime tend to come from more dispersed populations in rural areas, they do stand somewhat better odds of avoiding the plague as long as they drive away refugees from the infected areas, and take a few minor precautions. Or so it may appear to them. And if it kills grandma and granddad, that's a big savings on long term care, as long as you don't get soft and blow a big wad on a fancy funeral.

Whatever happened to the real good old days, when an elder would realize that they were a burden on the tribe and wander off into the wilderness to get eaten by wild animals? Good times, man. And there was no friggin' estate tax, either. Oh wait: there were no friggin' estates.

My neighbors indulge in bursts of gunfire at irregular intervals. It provides a comforting soundscape as we shelter in place.

If the administration withdraws all support for an extended shutdown, it will mean that any business or worker who chooses individually to stay home and keep distance will have no legal backing. Lost income will simply be lost. Meanwhile, the outside world will become rapidly more dangerous as the foolhardy and the dutiful go out and mingle, giving the virus the freest possible rein. Any public spaces will become more of a Petri dish than they are already. Gas pump handles are supposedly oozing with viruses even now. When you go out for groceries you will get lots of added value to challenge your immune system. Your weekly church service to get closer to God might actually send you to meet Him. It's okay. Earthly life is just pain and suffering anyway. Death is a mercy.

If this life is such shit, and death is a mercy, why have children? Why subject anyone who does not yet exist to the misery of existence? Sharing the joy?

The best response from the working class would be a general strike. Refuse to come out and join the dance of death being advocated by the corporate tools pushing heartless policies. Hardasses will call it some kind of tough love, and our duty, like storming ashore on a beach raked by gunfire, knowing that 25 percent of you will never make it all the way across. Do it for the economy, people! Here's your chance to be a real capitalist hero, and die for the American way of life.

Hey, the fatality rate isn't that bad. Relax! You'll probably be fine. Some people have no symptoms at all! Anyone who died was already a weakling. We're better off without them.

We're seeing a new War Between the States, only this time it's states of mind. The only way voluntary efforts could prevail in the face of official indifference would be for the vast majority to go along. So many people would have to join that it became the official position simply because there were too few people left to enforce the murder-suicide of business as usual. This seems highly unlikely. Our next best hope will be that a support bill passes that actually provides support to the job-doers, without whom the "job creators" have nothing to crow about.

If investors get bailed out every time the economy crashes, what is all that bullshit about the risks they take? The people who are losing are the ones with small holdings in their little retirement accounts, that they were told would be so much more desirable than stupid old Social Security. Within my own lifetime I have seen those crash at least three times, while the mega fortunes just twitched a bit and kept lumbering forward.

It didn't have to be this way. It doesn't have to be this way. Insist that it not be this way. Rational plans are circulating, but they still need to be adopted and put into play. It will require big moves, national-size moves as detailed in a piece from Forbes contributor Laurence Kotlikoff on March 21.

There is almost no support for a human-based response from the Senate majority or the White House. Those who can are preparing to save themselves. It's entirely consistent with the philosophy of social disintegration that they call "individual responsibility and liberty." Translated, that means, "You're on your own, chum."

There is no Davos for workers

It's a lot easier to organize a small number of rich people than a large population of workers. The rich have the advantage of not having to work. They may put in long hours, but those hours are devoted to  consolidating and exerting their power. The actual workers have to put in their hours at toil they mostly did not choose. Then they have to be their own servants to maintain whatever sort of home they have.

There is no Davos for workers. Organized labor needs preparations as if for nuclear war, or a famine, or a catastrophic storm: shelter and sustenance for all, ready to deploy on short notice when a collective action cuts off everyone's income.

We don't have massive strikes and demonstrations in this country because our population is so dispersed. People would have to get to the nation's capital to swarm it. We've had a few, but they require extreme provocation. Movements are hard to sustain. Swarming in your own area is only as effective as the media coverage of it. And a mess in any major city is only a mild curiosity to anyone 15 miles away. Simultaneous actions in many cities might draw notice, but would further alienate the rural populations that control the US Senate. And before too long you have to get back to gainful employment: that thing we call work.

From the standpoint of the wealthy, our greatest age was the Gilded Age, when we emerged as a global power. Only when a member of the privileged class finally came down with an advanced case of noblesse oblige did we manage to get FDR's New Deal, and its struggling descendants into the 1960s. The 1970s were the neutral moment in the swing of the pendulum, as its return began almost imperceptibly. It has been sweeping back as a wrecking ball since 1980.

Social movements develop their own internal logic. The movement back toward centralized authority controlled by the wealthy will not stop until that status is achieved. And the pendulum may stop right there as the petty kings of corporatocracy metaphorically stop the rotation of the Earth. They will have vastly more advanced weapon and surveillance technology than their ancestors had, with which to quell uprisings. Good, obedient citizens will applaud the mass murder of dissenters. Because the internal logic for this has been building for decades, we can't vote it away. Its supporters will vote their beliefs, their feelings, their desires for a strong hand. Sure, they want a small government, but that government will still have the job of crushing dissidents. Among the free and armed citizens, the plutocrats will smile indulgently as their unofficial enforcers do the wet work. Freedom is for those who conform.

This could be stopped by peaceful means if enough swing voters would realize -- and care -- where things are headed, but they don't.

The occupant of the Oval Office from January, 2017 to January, 2021 was the greatest thing to happen to the right wing since Ronald Reagan. Indeed, he is the logical heir. Along the way have been many contributors to the rise of the right. Listeners to right-wing talk radio can feel like badasses without having to do anything. The minority who do want to do things can join militias and maybe some day get to shoot some people or blow something up. But the movement is mostly supported by chickenshits who want to make lots of money, pay little in taxes, and take no real risks.

You want common ground to build a coalition? That's it right there. Those same desires have fueled corporate Democrats now labeled as neoliberal. Make lots of money. Don't get shot at.

I'm with you when it comes to not getting shot at. But we diverge over the money. The pursuit of wealth automatically destroys the environment and the well-being of the ecosystem. It tramples on the rights of indigenous peoples to live in their environmentally balanced ways. You may destroy slowly, thoughtfully, and with a measure of regret, but you will destroy. And competition -- a cornerstone of the capitalist philosophy -- guarantees that the destruction will be neither slow nor regretful. Too many people will be shoving and grabbing to get their pile.

I'll still dangle the hope that a slim majority will vote together to put the brakes on what looks like a killer avalanche. Even then, that alliance will have to hold its ground and defend its perimeter long enough for the benefits to become obvious to a more reliable majority. And every generation will have to have the same arguments over and over.

COVID-19 could be anywhere

With coronavirus in the news, everyone is figuring out how to react. Habitual preppers hardly have to change a thing, but the rest of us have to decide how much we can afford to do, and what we can't afford not to.

I live in a rural area with a low and fairly dispersed population in the winter. How much do I need to worry? I don't discount it. I really wonder.

I went to the grocery store last Tuesday, thinking to stock up on a few items with long shelf life, like brown rice and canned beans. I'd read that hand sanitizer is a good idea, so I was going to get some larger containers of it to supplement the little ones that mostly lie around drying up in my car or in my traveling shaving kit that gets used maybe twice a year.

The rice was gone. The beans weren't completely gone, but the shelves had some gaps. Forget hand sanitizer. I bought a bottle of alcohol to keep in the car to clean the gas pump handle, and rinse all the oil out of my skin after touching it.

I'm a lousy prepper, because I can imagine too much and have the budget for too little. Fatalism kicks in. I fall back to my old standby, social isolation. It's not as stringent as quarantine. I just indulge my natural introversion and avoid people. It's virtually indistinguishable from the way I live my normal life. The major difference would be some degree of food stockpiling, but I try to eat mostly fresh food. I need to figure out what will provide decent nutrition for an extended period of shortage should a buying panic deplete shelves, or an actual epidemic cut supply lines for real.

I saw one person wearing a mask. I don't know if she was feeling sick and containing her own germs, or hadn't gotten the memo that a mask won't protect you from incoming pathogens. It wasn't even the recommended N95 model. I gave her no wider or narrower passing clearance than I give anyone.

In the produce department, some private thought made me laugh in a way that sounded like a cough. A store employee shelving vegetables darted a look at me. I tried to continue the laugh longer than was really called for, to prove that I hadn't just puffed out a disease cloud, but that just made me look like a crazy person. I moved away from her only slightly faster than she moved away from me.

Only a couple of cases have been reported so far in New Hampshire. It's been such a weak winter that we haven't seen large numbers of tourists. Here in central New Hampshire, summer is the busiest time of year. Second home residents and long-term vacationers come for the liquid water. Winter brings its own category of tourism, but the local population is at its lowest. Winter visitors come in waves: weekends and the notorious Massachusetts Vacation Week in February. The volume depends on whether the snow and ice are good enough to attract them. Even then, the biggest numbers tend further north and closer to the major downhill ski areas.

Local people travel. New Hampshire's winter school vacation usually comes the week after the Massachusetts break in most school districts. In the tourist business we notice that Massachusetts people come up here, but New Hampshire people go someplace warm. People are going to be in airplanes. They're going to visit places that may have reported a higher incidence of infection. More and more information emerges every day. And residents travel for other reasons, on their own schedules. Have they been exposed? Meanwhile, not much around here looks any different except for the few shortages noted above. How rapidly might that change?

At our bike and ski shop, we're all pretty germ-phobic already. Even when a new weird plague isn't stalking the land, there's influenza, the common cold, and norovirus. Our staff is tiny. Any absence due to sickness seriously hampers our ability to operate at all. We do our utmost to stay healthy. But up to this point the perils we faced were known evils with established courses of treatment. It is the unknown that makes coronavirus more fearful. You alternate between reassurance when you hear that  the fatality rate is relatively low, and stabs of anxiety when you imagine being one of the ones who ends up gasping for breath while a helpless medical staff just watches you die. We all have to die of something, but most of us are in no hurry to meet that obligation.

Yesterday, a customer came in to discuss a future bike purchase. This guy is a retired physician, and he spent the whole time coughing all over the shop owner. One of New Hampshire's COVID-19 cases works for Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center, and the idiot ignored the order to isolate himself, choosing to go expose a bunch of other people and force them into quarantine. What do you do about oblivious, selfish people who blunder around smearing whatever they've got all over every surface, as carefree as a snot-dripping toddler?

As much as a densely populated area provides much greater risk of exposure just because more people are crammed more closely together, such areas also automatically tend to come with more densely located services. A widespread outbreak in an area of dispersed population such as the one where I live would present much greater challenges for treatment as well as self-care if you had to endure either protective isolation or ride out the course of actual disease.

Beyond just money, due diligence takes time. Routines fall prey to the need for more elaborate procedures. Most people will weigh the risks, do little or nothing, and hope. It's easy to tell everyone to wash their hands constantly. You never realize how scarce public facilities are, or in what gross shape, until you feel that you need them dozens of times a day. As for hand sanitizer, it's already in short supply, as noted.

How worried do you need to be, to avoid an illness that could be trivial or fatal, that's contagious before symptoms appear, for which there is no vaccine and no treatment other than amelioration of symptoms as your body fights it with only whatever your immune system can provide? And how aggressively are you going to have to compete against people who were more worried, sooner?

Everything You Always Wanted from Your Government, but were Afraid to Ask

Joe Biden's victory in South Carolina shows that the forces of reason are reasserting themselves in the topsy-turvy Democratic Party. The moonbats of progressivism are being brought to heel by the adults in the room.

Realpolitik rules. It's what makes government work, and what makes it a constant disappointment. As I observed in the previous post, what makes a politician on the nominal left electable is the assurance that he or she will continue the inexorable pull to the right.

In the quest for electability, candidates like Joe Biden, Michael Bloomberg, and Pete Buttigeig all in varying degrees make sure that the broader electorate knows that they will not support things like an actual system of universal health care based on patient outcomes rather than corporate income. They don't use the word "free" to refer to education. Nothing is socialistic.

Socialism is a scare word with good reason. It has much less power now than it did when our global nemesis was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, but the USSR did plenty to tarnish the brand, which -- in its purest form -- is a recipe for just another kind of heavy-handed government. The negative stereotype has wide, deep roots and a dense, hard grain that you won't cut just by insisting that this socialism is democratic, and doesn't really mean what one definition of the word has always meant: government ownership of the means of production. It's been politically risky from the outset to try to turn socialism into a proud badge of American identity. It was one of those things that you would try to ignore, while focusing on the actual good things offered by the movement. But too many people can't overcome their ingrained visceral repulsion at the term. And then there are the wealthy, who stand to lose, bigly, with the institution of any form of widespread democratization in the workplace and the economy at large.

Small business owners may be even more afraid of humanitarian movements, because small businesses are much more vulnerable to all sorts of destructive forces. Technological developments or social trends may kill demand for your product or service with no quick route to regain your revenue stream. Rising wages not coupled with other social improvements like universal health care and affordable access to education and retraining may make employees too expensive, even though your business volume calls for more personnel. But because universal health care has been widely reviled for decades, you know as a business person that it's too risky even to try. Because everything in this country since 1980 has been based on the pursuit of profit and the glorification of wealth, it's un-American to suggest that education should be subsidized and expanded.

Tax policy could be designed to extract much more from the big earners, especially the corporate behemoths that profit inversely to their social responsibility, but that would require an overhaul of investment culture at its most basic level. Good luck with that.

This is why we can't have nice things: because the people with lots of nice things don't want to give any of them up, and the people who have managed to scrape together a few nice things know from sad experience that they are the ones who will get squeezed if any pie-in-the-sky programs get adopted. The wealthy who control the government will make sure that they get their preferential tax policy no matter what crazy bills manage to crawl all the way through an accidentally and temporarily progressive majority in Congress and get signed into law by the odd and occasional Democratic chief executive.

Even Democratic and unaffiliated voters who might want those nice social policies are afraid to ask for them because they know they will get hammered by the opposition from the GOP, corporate Democrats, and right-leaning unaffiliated voters.

The unifying factor among the majority of voters is that they want to make plenty of money, pay as  little as possible in taxes, and take no real risks. Even the lefties who say they don't mind if their taxes are high only accept the taxation as long as the money goes to the kinds of social programs they believe are ultimately good.

Policy fails because its proponents can't convince enough people that it is ultimately good. Because any policy usually takes a long time to show results, the waiting period often spans an election cycle, giving disappointed voters a chance to flip the party dominance in retribution. This generally derails beneficial social policies more than destructive ones, because nurturing and growth are slow processes that require patience. Destruction often shows quick profits, even if they're only a benefit to the rich getting richer. Economic pundits can still point to positive numbers as evidence that this is the way we should have been headed all along. That goes back to the fundamental toxicity underlying investment for profit. And the conservatives gravitate more readily to a warlike model of political interaction, which bolsters gerrymandering and dark money contributions to advance the glorious cause of unlimited wealth on a finite Earth.

Electable Democrats

As Bernie Sanders continues to build what looks like an avalanche of support among unanticipated legions of naive dreamers, the analysts fret and the experts foment that defeat is thereby assured in the general election. We don't need someone who is dominating primary elections. We need someone who can win The Big One. We need someone electable.

With recent history as our guide, we can safely say that electable Democrats only slow the rate at which our country and the world decline. Electable means that they don't threaten corporate domination of our economy. Electable means that they don't do anything substantial to overturn endemic racism. Electable means that they water down or completely abandon measures to protect the environment. It means that they don't persist when seeking full freedom and respect for women at all levels of leadership.

You can't do anything if you don't get elected at all. But you really won't do anything anyway if you're an electable Democrat.

After Lyndon Johnson decided not to push his luck, Republicans put a lock on the Oval Office that held until Richard Nixon stepped in it so badly that his successor, Gerald Ford, couldn't hold off a plucky peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia. But the peanut farmer only made it once. He wasn't re-electable.

For one thing, Jimmy Carter was too idealistic. They were good ideals, too. Solar panels on the White House. A suggestion that our consumer society might want to take a look at itself and reassess its priorities. A nudge toward citizen responsibility for society's well-being. So of course he got hammered, and the Democratic Party was shut out for another dozen years. We got trickle-down economics, union-busting, and legitimization of reactionary sentiments in an increasingly hard-line backlash against "liberalism."

Along came Bill Clinton, a Baby Boomer with a rock 'n' roll soundtrack and a sly southern drawl. You knew he was a bit of a rogue, but he was smart and charming and brought youthful energy to an office that had been dominated by old fuds for too long. He managed to hang on for two terms, but his embarrassing behavior in the second one poisoned the well again for the next eight years. But what got him into office in the first place was that he did not threaten the status quo in corporate capitalism. There was that early push for universal health care, but they dropped that like a hot rock and never looked back when they saw that big money was going to stone them with it in the next election. The Clintons were not shy about admitting that they wanted to be rich and saw nothing wrong with being rich to the limit of one's ability to suck in and retain assets.

Given what happened in 2016, I have absolutely no explanation for the election of Barack Obama in 2008. He was undeniably moderate, intelligent and eloquent, but his race was problematic. I have even less explanation for his re-election, although I am glad that he won both of his elections. Throughout his presidency, though, I knew that it was only delaying the inevitable. Nothing was really getting fixed. His presidency solidified the dark energy that propelled the current occupant of the Oval Office to victory in 2016. We are now set back considerably, and going further in the wrong direction every day.

Congressional elections are even more crucial than presidential elections to ensure that the country moves forward on anyone's agenda. If everyone could vote from neutrally-composed districts, elected officials would have to address issues knowing that their solutions really do have to satisfy the needs of ordinary voters regardless of party. The way that the two major parties have divided the problems of our nation, our world, and our species into binary, yes-or-no questions assures that we will fail to improve the situation for all but a handful of wealthy potentates and the uppermost of their loyal retainers. The GOP in particular has made governing nearly impossible by making the government itself look more evil than the real evils that threaten the liberty and happiness of ordinary people.

Conservatives talk about liberty, but only envision what they call "normal" people getting to use it. The right vilifies the left for promoting intrusive government. The "intrusion" consists of insisting that people and corporations pay their taxes, and enacting regulations to protect the environment. The intrusion curtails the right wing's ability to limit the freedom and prosperity of minorities of all kinds. The big government of the left is no bigger than it needs to be, to keep greedheads and bigots from inflicting their cruelty on people who make them uncomfortable.

You know who makes me uncomfortable? People who throw their shoulders around and threaten violence. People who have to walk around with guns hanging off of them. They can be ISIS or NRA, makes no nevermind. If you have to make a big time about how armed and dangerous you are, you're part of the problem. Your kind may well prevail, to the detriment of the happiness of our entire species, but you're still the problem. A world ruled on those principles is dark, dirty, and doomed.

The dominant opinion on the Democratic side is that Bernie Sanders is going to lose the 2020 election. His massive support among progressive factions will fail to provide enough votes to overcome all the advantages held by the incumbent, regardless of whether those advantages are ethical and legal.

If Bernie is toxic, the Democratic Party must take steps to put someone else up there. No one else in the primary field seems to inspire huge waves of enthusiasm. So we're screwed either way, unless enough people are repulsed by the GOP to vote against them no matter who gets the nod from the Democrats.

If the Democrats spend the next four months beating it into people's heads that Bernie can't win the general election, and then they let him become the nominee because they'll face an insurrection within their own party, they'll either have to bend over and back up to Trump or start working overtime to try to undo the damage they've done to Bernie's campaign. I hear a lot of blame hurled at progressives for being uncompromising and naive, but they keep winning these early primaries. Elections are decided by the people who show up.

The clouds of analysis grow thicker and thicker. That helps nothing.  It only creates more fog, more optical illusions and mirages over a real landscape that was already difficult to discern even without all the vapor and tricky lighting.

If anything emerges from this, it's that the policies presented by the progressives are way more popular than hedged bets offered by the candidates identifying themselves as moderate, if they identify themselves at all. A politician identifies according to the audience addressed. I do understand that elections require a certain flexibility, as does parliamentary government. But that gets back to the basis for our voting districts being prejudicial to the outcome. You never know for sure until someone gets into office. Even then, the thing that derails something you were looking forward to can take place in a meeting you never hear about, for reasons that legitimately and regrettably force a change in priorities. If you really want to know what's going on, get elected yourself and hear it on the inside. That's not an option for most of us, so we make do with what we can glean.

Revolutions are forced. Evolution happens.

We were taught in school that the American Revolution was a glorious stride in the direction of a better world. What it really did was put a rotating cast of rich white men in place of the British monarchy and its agents as the decision makers for this chunk of North America, without even firmly determined boundaries yet. The men in charge were all beneficiaries of the system of chattel slavery, whether they owned any or not. They continued the policy of displacing and eradicating the existing native population. Women could suggest, as Abigail Adams did, that they be included in this new government of the free, but that had to wait for a later century, and see some women actually killed in the pursuit of it.

"Do what I want or I will kill you," has been a compelling argument throughout our existence. It may be preceded by, "Do what I want or I will beat you up," but it always lies in the background, ready to be used, like a black rifle carried down a city street, or a militarized police force's surplus tank that they just got as a hand-me-down from the real armed forces.

People who deride hippies and other peaceniks in this country assure us that human nature is incorrigibly mean and nasty. One must always be ready to fight for peace. Any peace that you enjoy here is protected by a fortified perimeter keeping the evil forces of worse nations at bay. And within this great land of ours, you need to be able to defend yourself against individual attackers who will inevitably spring up.

This can be a real problem if they are wearing law enforcement uniforms, or you're a woman and he's your boss, or you're black and they're not, or the attackers are using their car as a weapon against you as you ride a bike. And that's just a few of the situations in which the myth of the armed citizen comes up against the realities of the legal system. And if you relax the standards for self defense you also create more cover stories for homicide.

Every so often, someone suggests that humans learn to put aside their animal promptings to force dominance, and instead develop more awareness of the fragility of life and the underlying sadness that we all share, whether we have ever noticed it in ourselves or not. But that sounds really boring, and it also makes you vulnerable to anyone who has not put down the weapons yet. In addition, because it requires that you take less in material wealth, and accept gratefully many amenities that we currently take for granted, it leaves more resources lying around for grabby people to grab. Which they definitely do.

Can humans guide their evolution by learning to do what is better for them, enacted in quiet revolutions of nonviolent change? Or will we be the victims of biological promptings expressed through advanced technology, becoming better and better destroyers until we succeed in destroying ourselves? Consumerism is far more destructive than war, because it uses pleasure instead of pain. There are those who lust for war. Not all of them are sideline profiteers. Some people enjoy the actual killing. There are people crazy enough to hope for a full-on exchange of nuclear missiles. But even if those people never get their way, we can live our peaceful little lives, "not hurting anybody," and burn it all down just as effectively. We've practically accomplished it already.

As the Democratic candidates compete for their party's nomination, polls show the policy positions of  Bernie Sanders seem extremely popular. His detractors on the left are marshaling their considerable resources to prevent him from being nominated. In this information -- and disinformation -- age, it's hard for a political lightweight to know for sure how much of the opposition research is true, but we've also learned that smears don't have to be true at all to do irreparable damage to Democratic candidates. Oddly, the same seems far less true of Republican candidates. But that's another topic entirely. The dirt on Bernie is probably quite verifiable. And, as someone pointed out somewhere on social media today, campaigns that spend all their time on damage control end up losing.

The proposals of the progressive wing of the Democrats trigger the conditioned reflexes of generations of Americans well trained to recoil from "socialism." Even though we've never really lived in a land of unlimited individual liberty, even for white men, the majority of us are conditioned to believe in an economic Utopia just over the horizon, or just behind us in a misty past, in which pure merit will be, or was, rewarded. Merit means hard work and good character. It rejects the controlling and coddling of Big Government in favor of rugged individualism. It is the land of the alpha male, and the underlings who know their place, because the meritocracy has weeded them, and they accept its judgment. It's one of the many things that sound good until you really think about them. But who has time for all that thinking? We have merit to accrue.

In the rest of the Democratic field, the same full-on socially connective and environmentally active positions put forward by Sanders appear in varying levels of dilution, all the way down to practically nothing. So then you have to wonder how much of anyone's formulation will survive actually being elected, and that's only if they manage to win. A couple of days ago, I found a chart that laid them all out nicely, but I didn't bookmark it, and now I can't find it again. Sorry about that. I'm sure you're closing in on a favorite on your own. Go make your mark! There's still a long process to sort it out further.

How to vote in the early primaries or caucuses

The 2016 election offered followers of both parties a variety of candidates to sort through. But in any election year, the party that is not in power will present a field of candidates to primary voters, all vying to make it through the long culling process to reach the nomination.

As a resident of New Hampshire, I have felt responsible to make what seem like good choices for the overall direction of national policy. This involves at least two components: the policies presented by each candidate, and the overall electability of the candidate.

Electability is the harder one to judge. As a result, I have lowered its importance, because it will emerge as the primary process crosses the country. In the earliest contests, it's much more important to pick a candidate whose policies you like, to let the party leadership know what you want to see in their final platform, no matter who is the standard-bearer.

People who fancy themselves as more politically sophisticated will try to make more nuanced choices. On the Republican side in the earliest voting states, I'll bet none of those people would have chosen the candidate who ultimately took the White House under their banner. The 2016 election turned on promises and bravado.

Promises and bravado are not good indicators of competence in office, but elections are guided mostly by emotion. Early voters should vet the policies that are presented. Understand as you do so that they will evolve for various reasons throughout the election, and through the distortion of political pressures once a candidate becomes an office holder and tries to force things through the sausage machine of actual legislation.

New Hampshire is a place to vote Utopian. Ask for it! Demand it! Realize that you probably won't get it! But make the statement because you have the chance, and the attention of the nation is -- briefly -- upon you.