Today’s Quora post:
What are your thoughts on Dr. Fauci telling reporters that America might still be battling smallpox and polio if today’s kind of misinformation existed back then?
Right on! But possibly he doesn’t go quite far enough. Not only were we not subjected to misinformation at the time the polio vaccine came available, neither did we have a President who deliberately and maliciously spread error and lies to advance his personal cause.
I grew up in the Middle East during the 1950s, in a Saudi-American oil camp. Polio was a terrifying scourge there, as it was in Europe and the Americas. If you didn’t die from it, you were likely to be crippled for the rest of your life. But polio was only one of the threats. We also had smallpox, typhus, tetanus, diphtheria, pertussis, cholera, typhoid…on and on. Where I lived, Americans had to take shots for each of these horrors once a year. Some of the shots were pretty darned painful — cholera and typhoid in particular.
Have you ever seen a person who has, by the grace of God, managed to survive smallpox? I have. He was a young man, possibly even still in his late teens. His face was so horrible it turned your stomach to look at him. Ravaged, like the skin had been burned off in a fire, but the scars were even worse than burn scars. He might have been better off to have died from the disease.
How about a person who has survived polio? Some of those folks were in the iron lung for the rest of their permanently limited lives, never able to breathe on their own again. Some escaped paralysis of the muscles that operate the lungs but never could walk normally again, or use their hands and arms normally. And polio, you know, comes back on you, even if you do recover from the initial onset. One of the best doctors I ever knew had to quit his practice and retire when a case of childhood polio flared up in middle age, after years of remission. The rest of his life was ruined.
A thousand curses upon a “president” and party who would deliberately spread the kind of lies, stupidity, and error that Mr. Trump and his worshipers have done. Their behavior has been nothing short of treasonous and murderous, exploiting the suffering, fear, and death of their fellow citizens in order to keep themselves in power.
And may we lay a thousand curses, too, upon those who have brought us an educational system that has failed to teach our citizens the most basic science. How can a grown man or woman have graduated from high school without any grasp of the simplest concepts of elementary biology? The uproar we’ve seen in this country is as much the result of pi$$-poor public education as it is of fear, of fundamentalist nuttiness, and political malfeasance. We have had a good fifty years of educational theory that puts social goals ahead of learning. Result: a citizenry that will believe any da*n-fool lie a demagogue tells them and who haven’t the simplest clue to the facts of history, science, or common sense.
Frankly, folks…as the leader of the Free World, we have dropped the ball.
Spot on – our parents were the “great generation” – we have failed miserably. Quit looking back at Trump, look forward to the future. Recover and carry on!
Well, no. They had their failures. Politically…remember McCarthyism? Vietnam? “Progressive education” — that kinder, gentler system that brought us utter ignorance of the way microbes and vaccines work — was a project of my parents’ generation.
Trump has not gone away. He may be discredited, but the people who brought us Mr. Trump will bring us other extremists and shysters.
Of course you’re correct. I need to read the following daily, maybe restore my patriotism (but remember it took the greatest country on earth 3 years to find Osama bin Laden).
July 22, 2018 ·
We rarely get a chance to see another country’s editorial about the USA
Read this excerpt from a Romanian Newspaper. The article was written by Mr. Cornel Nistorescu and published under the title ‘C’ntarea Americii, meaning ‘Ode ToAmerica ‘) in the Romanian newspaper Evenimentulzilei ‘The Daily Event’ or ‘News of the Day’.
~An Ode to America ~
Why are Americans so united? They would not resemble one another even if you painted them all one color! They speak all the languages of the world and form an astonishing mixture of civilizations and religious beliefs.
On 9/ll, the American tragedy turned three hundred million people into a hand put on the heart. Nobody rushed to accuse the White House, the Army, or the Secret Service that they are only a bunch of losers. Nobody rushed to empty their bank accounts. Nobody rushed out onto the streets nearby to gape about.
Instead the Americans volunteered to donate blood and to give a helping hand.
After the first moments of panic, they raised their flag over the smoking ruins, putting on T-shirts, caps and ties in the colors of the national flag. They placed flags on buildings and cars as if in every place and on every car a government official or the president was passing. On every occasion, they started singing: ‘God Bless America !’
I watched the live broadcast and rerun after rerun for hours listening to the story of the guy who went down one hundred floors with a woman in a wheelchair without knowing who she was, or of the Californian hockey player, who gave his life fighting with the terrorists and prevented the plane from hitting a target that could have killed other hundreds or thousands of people.
How on earth were they able to respond united as one human being? Imperceptibly, with every word and musical note, the memory of some turned into a modern myth of tragic heroes. And with every phone call, millions and millions of dollars were put into collection aimed at rewarding not a man or a family, but a spirit, which no money can buy. What on earth unites the Americans in such a way? Their land? Their history? Their economic Power? Money? I tried for hours to find an answer, humming songs and murmuring phrases with the risk of sounding commonplace, I thought things over, I reached but only one conclusion… Only freedom can work such miracles.
Cornel Nistorescu
(This deserves to be passed around the Internet forever.) It took a person on the outside – looking in – to see what we take for granted !
GOD BLESS AMERICA !!!
I blame social media too. There’s an infinite amount of disinformation on social media sites that will confirm any bias you might have.
So few people actually keep up with the news on mainstream news sites or read newspapers. I have co-workers who simply don’t know what’s going on in the world outside of their neighborhoods and don’t really care either. One co-worker told me she doesn’t follow the news because it upsets her too much. *sigh*
True, we didn’t have social media back in the Dark Ages…err…the Good Ole Days. We had the phone, though — and party lines, which could let several people yak together.
We DID have newspapers! Usually any big city had two or three. And they all had things to read like Ann Landers and her sister, Dear Abby, and Herb Caen, and the letters to the editor, and the society pages, and…oh yeah: the news. PLUS there was another kind of network that has evolved into something different (another way of saying “died out”): HOUSEWIVES. Most women did not trudge off to work each morning. They saw the kiddies off to school, then sat down to a big electric percolator full of fresh-brewed coffee with the neighbor women. A whole lot of news was exchanged and discussed among those women — some of it, of course, gossip; but a lot of it current events, politics, social issues, and whatnot.
Matter of fact…hmmm… I’d go so far as to suggest that the morning or the afternoon coffeepot was the equivalent of today’s social media, where people passed news, gossip and opinion in an informal setting. WOMEN were the social media of the 1950s!
Can’t blame your coworker. The news IS upsetting these days. Especially if you read the snark-filled, venomous comments sections at most major news sites. Gaaaaaaahhhhh!!!!!
Since you closed the comments on your posts about appliances specifically modern clothes washers, I thought I would let you know I figured out how to avoid the braided clothes problem from the energy efficient modern washer cycles: use the bedding cycle because it is gentle avoiding thus the beating the clothes on the rocks problem which was fraying my clothes and also avoids the braids!
No kidding! Wow–that IS a major discovery!!
WordPress automatically closes comments after a certain period — sorry about that! Thanks for sharing this revelation.