IN THESE TIMES...

NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt on the National Mall

In these times, eerily feeling of past horrors... I am 65... I miss Susan Sontag and other thinkers who had the language, the ability to hold-up, to pull shadowy examples of human nature: the desire for “quick and dirty” solutions; “Back to Normal soon”… Revealing to Us the most fundamental of mistakes being perpetrated then (AIDS pandemic) and repeated again.

The language surrounding the “outbreak”, “epidemic”, “pandemic”, “scourge”… chose one… of any disease like “Corona Virus” or COVID-19:  the militaristic language associated with it (AIDS being Sontag’s focus in the late 70’s-80's: “AIDS and it’s Metaphors”)—from descriptions of the biological process (an invasion through the body's weak defenses) to treatment (“a war”) need to be examined as the cowardly “Us Against Them” constructions that they were and now are. Such language burdens patients struggling with isolation, “Quarantine”: not only do they seem to have to shoulder some responsibility (being aged or infirm… “weak”… Queer), they also have to shoulder arms against “it”… This horrible affliction that strikes, as we are learning now, almost at random.

Destructive to Our cultural sense of harmony and humanity, the Metaphors adopted from “Us Against Them” constructs fly: “Evil”… “Infirm”… “Older People” (Read Weak and not to be trusted)… “The Enemy to be Avoided”… “Quarantine”… “War”… without bounds.. It is ironic that cases in New York City now appear to be most serious among the young (virulent?) male population: 20-50yrs old: Across the United States, about 38% of corona virus patients sick enough to be hospitalized were ages 20 to 54, the CDC reported last week.

 The use of such Metaphors in a time where individualized compassion and understanding is most wanted, in Sontag’s view, combine(s) to create the effect that “much of the very reputation of the illness is added to the suffering of those who had it”—a situation not helped by the use of words like “cancer” in slang to mean the epitome of evil: “There is a Cancer on the Presidency” or “AIDS”… the “GAY DISEASE”, and now Corona. “the disease of the “Weak”… 

Healthcare is not WAR..and the faces of those working in the field are not those of "soldiers" and, NO, they are not HEROS, to be thrown into the breach. If there is a breach it is our collective fault and we should be ashamed.

Cynicism = Cowardice

Often I see around me people who mistake cynicism for critical thinking. 

 David Bowie in the song "Changes" wrote about youth's immunity to the consultations of the cynics of this world:
"the children that you spit on as they try to change their world are immune to your consultations, they're well aware what they're going through."

Moran cautioned that :“cynicism scours through a culture like bleach, wiping out millions of small, seedling ideas,”

Theodore Roosevelt admonished against “that cheap temptation” to be cynical, and wrote:

The poorest way to face life is to face it with a sneer. There are many men who feel a kind of twister pride in cynicism; there are many who confine themselves to criticism of the way others do what they themselves dare not even attempt. There is no more unhealthy being, no man less worthy of respect, than he who either really holds, or feigns to hold, an attitude of 
 sneering disbelief toward all that is great and lofty, whether in achievement or in that noble effort which, even if it fails, comes to second achievement. A cynical habit of thought and speech, a readiness to criticise work which the critic himself never tries to perform, an intellectual aloofness which will not accept contact with life’s realities — all these are marks, not as the possessor would fain to think, of superiority but of weakness. 

With an eye to those lazy critics — Roosevelt offed:
    It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat…

In My mind, Cynicism = Cowardice and I avoid all who practice it.

Fortune Favors the Bold

Virgil

FORTUNE FAVORS THE BOLD...

                                   VIRGIL

            

        **** AVOID HYSTERICS EVERYDAY...