Balance

Today is Friday, November 12 (TGIF),  the day for the faculty of balance.  With balance, the mind is pure.

One year ago today, actress Lynn Kellogg, best known for her role as Sheila in the original 1968 Broadway production of Hair, died from the covids at a hospital in St. Louis.  Impermanence is swift.  Her husband said she became infected after attending a gathering in Branson, Missouri in which most of the attendees did not wear masks.

The average daily number of new covid cases in Georgia dropped below 1,000 again today, but that may be just due to underreporting during yesterday's Veterans Day holiday.

But according to an interesting article in the Times today, this is it.  It's not going to get better than this.  One thousand statewide cases per day is going to be the new normal.  We now have vaccines and boosters for prevention and medications for treatment.  Georgia, if not America, if not the world, has apparently decided this is a level of risk we can live with, not unlike heart disease and cancer and automobile fatalities.  Things are not going to get noticeably better soon, and if we don't go back to living life "normally" now, we won't for several more years, which is to say we're never going back.  Hey, no one lives forever.  Do I need to remind you of impermanence again?

But the shame is this all could have been avoided.  If the disgraced, twice-impeached former "president" only took it more seriously, if people only complied with stay-at-home orders and mask mandates when the virus first appeared, we could have nipped it in the bud before it became so wide spread and out of control.  But, alas.  We're now handing the next generation a world with yet another disease to worry about, although climate change will likely keep most of their attention.  

We could have made the world  better place, but instead we opted for shittier.