Always an Enemy / Blue States, Stick a Fork in Them / My Childhood Pandemic

Always an Enemy – The shortages were breathtaking: surgical masks, medical gowns, ventilators, tests, reagents needed for making the tests, swabs, and, yes, even epidemiologists who might have been able to foresee this calamity – The United States got caught, again, with its pants down. And, guess where we have to purchase all these products we now need to confront this pandemic? Somehow, through negligence, a collective attention span of about 10 minutes, no foresight or planning, complacency, and only meager stockpiles available, America found itself in the extraordinary position of pleading with our archenemy China for emergency support and aid.

And, how does our overmatched, overwhelmed and frankly idiotic President handle this national emergency at its height? He insults China, and accuses them of starting the pandemic in a Wuhan laboratory; he begins to refer to the virus as the ‘Chinese virus.’ Instead of attempting to tone down the rhetoric a little, and curry a little bit of good will, Mr. Trump chooses to go full bore with his accusations. 

Whatever the truth is about the origins of the COVID, and we certainly cannot prove right now if China intentionally started this horror, America needs desperately the products that China possesses or can manufacture to fight this virus. So, Donald Trump, for once just hold your tongue and shut up. Pick up the fight much later, please, if you must.

But he won’t. Mr. Trump needs enemies. That’s the life force that propels him, I think, every waking moment. His very troubled psyche cannot tolerate equanimity; he’s always been a disrupter, a destroyer. And, to our peril, he’s the current President of the United States, as his own internal wars have metastasized. I think it’s becoming so apparent lately: he no longer is in control of his destructive impulses, and he’s leading America down a very frightening and ominous path.  God help us.



Blue States, Stick a Fork in Them…Mr. Gripes is going to disappoint his lockstep, Democratic  friends with this item, but I think Mitch McConnell’s right regarding his stance on, as he puts it, the ‘blue’ states’ calamitous waste of federal money. 
 
One has to acknowledge he’s spot-on that these states and cities, with their hugely populous urban centers, have squandered for many years billions and billions – trillions of dollars, actually – not, as they profess, to actually ameliorate the economic and residential conditions of the urban poor, but to perpetuate the incredibly corrupt, profligate, and unaccountable Democratic power bases that have ruled, with essentially no opposition, for decades – since the end of World War II, in fact. The proof is in the pudding: the urban under classes, even as they vote in overwhelming numbers for Democratic candidates in every election, have less earning power now than 30 years ago. Nothing’s changed. Except for those trillions of dollars down the drain.

Let’s look at New York as an example: Mr. Gripes has lived in and around New York for a good part of his life, and the out-of-control spending with the sole purpose of maintaining political control and power has been and continues to be appalling. 

A perfect example: our present mayor, Bill de Blasio, ignoring valid charges of nepotism, placed his hapless wife in charge of some spurious ‘mental health’ initiative four years ago. It’s been a colossal failure from its onset. For one thing, its mission was never fully explained. And, proving that it’s been nothing but a shell organization, there has been no progress report as to its aim or its ensuing effectiveness, and whether any goals were reached. As one critic asserted, the initiative – named ThriveNYC – mainly is an exercise in ‘pamphlets’, i.e. a raft of flyers distributed at public libraries to be picked up and read by library patrons [no one reads them, of course].
 
And with the multitude of pressing mental health issues – domestic violence, suicide, depression, feelings of isolation, loss of jobs, et alia-- emerging now with so many people in need of urgent attention, we hear not a thing from Thrive. Not one word as to its contributions, which probably do not exist.  In a just world, it’d be an egregious scandal. And, what a waste of money: the program has burned through $1 BILLION[!] over its four years’ existence. 

[In reality, Mr. Gripes, who can sniff out political chicanery and venality from ten miles down the road, knows the sole reason for Thrive’s creation: it’s to raise the profile of Mr. de Blasio’s wife, to be followed up by her running for some worthless office in 2021, keeping Bill’s name in the news; then the plan is for him to run for President again in 2024.]

Tales of criminality like this make Mr. Gripes’ blood boil. And there are so many examples of the squandering of billions of dollars over the years, on the part of our urban mayors.

Well, finally it all has caught up with blue state cities. Having wasted so much of their federal largesse and at the moment left with nothing but humongous debts, these states have no political currency any more: they’re broke and are going to have to beg. An angry Mr. McConnell is correct: why should more federal aid be forthcoming for these bankrupt cities, when we all know that they’ll misuse that money again? I understand his resistance to throwing more billions at these money pits.

What’s going to happen? The states will eventually receive federal financial aid they desperately need to pay for teachers, cops, firemen, public hospital workers, and the like. That’s a given. But, Mr. McConnell and his Republican allies are no longer, I think, going to simply sign off on additional funding for the urban politicians to spend as they see fit, to feather their own political nests. Strict conditions will be imposed on any federally funded program for a city: no more gazillions to spend on propping up corrupt, unaccountable Democratic urban administrations and their phony, slush-fund non-profits and fraudulent ‘programs.’  Finally, a politician says, ‘Enough is enough.’



My Childhood Pandemic – From the early days of this viral pandemic we’re all experiencing right now,  I felt in my bones I had been through this before.

What that earlier experience was, I just couldn’t pin it down. Mysterious, yet the emotions seemed very familiar. Indeed, a sense of déjà vu: absolute dread and fear about what lay ahead of us, and a firm, paralyzing belief that I was going to be powerless to fight the coming storm. This was a repetition of a suppressed memory.

Well, ten days ago, I finally recalled the earlier pandemic that so affected me: almost 70 years ago, in 1954, a polio ‘scourge’ grabbed the United States by the throat. 

The back story: as a child, I was obsessed over current events – I followed world developments closely as a young kid.  I didn’t really understand or absorb much of what I was reading, but just enough to sometimes scare the hell of me [Russians dropping the atom bomb on us, for instance]. During that 1954 summer, as I recall it, the heat never let up day after day. And, of course, I linked up the intense heat wave to a rising incidence of polio. In this child’s mind, that meant that polio, and its attendant horrors, would inevitably get me.
 
I perused the newspaper every morning, and noticed that the number of polio infections was increasing daily and, even more worrisome, coursing its way up the East Coast. One day, there were, say, 14 new cases in Georgia, then a couple of days later, 20 cases in North Carolina, then 30 more polio victims in Virginia, etc. And it was overwhelmingly kids who were afflicted. This pattern went on for weeks; I was certain polio would soon get to Long Island, and kill or paralyze me, my brothers and sister, and my friends. I just couldn’t shake that nightmare scenario.
 
[Let’s remember that the medical term for polio is, in part, infantile paralysis—it disproportionally struck children.] That fear of losing the use of my arms or legs, or being shackled to an iron lung for the rest of my life was horrifying to me. Death, in fact, would have been preferable.

Then, everything changed.

Sometime early in July, out of the blue, I and my siblings were abruptly sent to a summer camp for six weeks. It was located in Massachusetts, in some remote corner of Cape Cod. I loved it there, and in the face of a glittering Atlantic Ocean nearby and a summer of playing baseball with new friends, the polio fears abated a bit. I didn’t read newspapers either. I just felt much safer in the Camp Chappa Chala alternate universe, arguing incessantly and annoyingly I’m sure, with New England kids about who was better, Ted Williams or Mickey Mantle.

A miracle then followed: camp ended in late August, and, not long afterwards, Dr. Jonas Salk invented a vaccination for polio. I don’t remember when we got our initial vaccines for polio, but I do recall climbing up stairs at an elementary-school auditorium stage, lined up with all my classmates in a long procession, and receiving a shot. Everyone in my school was given an injection, hundreds of kids. Then a month or so later, getting another one, ‘the booster shot.’ Polio had been eradicated in America, just like that.

From the certitude that I was going to either die or end up immobile in a hospital bed for the rest of my life, I had survived unscathed. A question remains to this day, however: did my parents by design send myself and my siblings up to that camp on Cape Cod to insulate us from that scourge ‘pandemic’ racing up the coast? I’ve often wondered about that lately. I’ll never get an answer.

By Jim Israel                                                                                                
May 7, 2020
‘Mr. Gripes’

 

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