Why geese make more sense than humans.

(June, 2020.)

As of the time of this writing, the world is more confusing and strange than it’s ever been before in my lifetime. I’m sitting holed up in my Lake Merritt apartment for the third month in a row. There’s a startling amount of new regulations and rules for going outside, visiting places, spending time with other people. City, state and federal governments, with partial enforcement from the police, have drawn up a long, inconsistent, and ever-changing new blueprint for how we are expected to live. Helicopters are circling the skies around my home for the fourth night in a row. Through megaphones, police voices are telling people there is an 8:00 curfew, and to stay in your homes. 

All of this is based on two key events. 

The first is the unexpected arrival of a virus designated by the scientific community as “COVID-19.” While traced back to 2019, this virus didn’t enter the news and common vernacular in the US until around February, and wasn’t taken very seriously by the public at large until early March. This virus is most similar to the seasonal flu, in that it can cause, in some people, cold symptoms (cough / sore throat / fatigue / etc), fever, headaches, and in some cases, nausea and vomiting. In the rarest of cases, usually among the elderly and immunocompromised, it can lead to death. A good friend’s mother recently died of complications due to covid. She had advanced stage cancer. I believe that at certain points during my own battles with cancer in 2017 and 2018, I would have died if I had come down with the virus.

The second event is the brutal killing of a black man by a white cop in Minneapolis. The world has widely watched this killing on the internet by now. The cop holds the man on the ground and gradually, systematically crushes the man’s windpipe with a knee pressed down onto the throat. The cop shows little emotion; I would describe his face as bemused, or even bored. A second cop, Asian, looks on and paces a bit, seeming vaguely uncomfortable, but holding his ground and keeping a growing group of spectators from interfering with what becomes a gradual murder. The black man cries out that he can’t breathe. After a minute or two, he begins to literally cry out for his mother. Several people capture the event on video, while pleading with the cops to let the man go. Eventually, the black man loses consciousness, and dies after being hauled away in a car by the two cops and two other police accomplices. Autopsies are conducted. Death is ruled as caused by asphyxia consistent with a choking victim - insufficient oxygen to the brain. The Minneapolis police state that the black man had originally been arrested by these cops for using one counterfeit $20 bill at a local market. 

Covid-19 is not the first flu-like virus that will run through the population of the globe, and kill a lot of people as it does. It will not be the last. Much like many such viruses, a vaccine will eventually be made. The scientific community is already working overtime to develop one. As they have many times, they’re going to save humanity from what might, a long long time ago, have been a plague upon the Earth. The fact that there is promising progress toward this already is frequently buried by headlines in the news, which read “Bleakest day ever,” or “Deaths hit [Insert large number] in [world or specific country].” The 24-hour news cycle has become obsessed with this illness, which means that the public has become obsessed with it as well. 

Tragically, George Floyd is not the first black man to be killed mercilessly by a white cop. He will not be the last. He’s not even the first black man killed by a white cop on camera. Not even close. But this particular senseless killing was the straw that broke the camel’s back. It has led to a record number of protests all over the country, from Minneapolis where it occurred, to Atlanta, Houston, New York, LA, San Francisco, and of course, here in Oakland. And not just a day of protests or even a weekend; as-of this writing, June 2nd, we are up to 8 straight days of protests, involving tens of thousands of people. 

So, a virus, not identical but very similar to others before it; and a cop killing a black man, as cops often do. Why are stores burning all over the Bay Area? Why are people taking to the streets daily and nightly? Why the curfews, the looting, the daily clashes between protesters and police? Why does it look like the Vietnam response all over again? Why now? Why this? 

There are a lot of theories, both simple and advanced, from all kinds of people. Everyone’s got a favorite in conversation on Facebook, Twitter, over Zoom meetings as we commiserate with our friends sheltering in place in our homes. My personal favorite, and a very popular one at the moment, is Trevor Noah’s. For 18 minutes, he waxes philosophical about how covid and the George Floyd killing and other events past and present have come together in a unique way to unlock this record unrest and shake the very foundation of the country, in a video that now more than 7 million people have watched on YouTube. 

The short version is that this killing has hit at just the right time and set off a long-overdue explosion, alongside an unrelated event (also captured on camera) in which a white woman didn’t like a conversation she was having with a calm black man in Central Park, and decided to call the police on him, using her privilege to lie and claim that the man was threatening her life. 

These kinds of things happen all the time in America, filmed and not. But right now, there is an incredible tension, inflamed by government, the media, and the scientific community, spreading like a cancer - like a virus - through the public at large. New regulations designed to limit the spread of covid have forced businesses all over the country to close, leading to an all-time high unemployment rate - I’ll say this again, all-time in the history of this country - of 23.9%, or over 1 in 5 Americans. As always, this rate is much higher in underserved, underprivileged and minority communities, including the black community, who are also, as always, much more impacted by disease and already at much higher risk than white communities due to poorer nutrition, living conditions, access to basic resources, etc. 

So. A virus starts circulating around, and kills more people of color than whites, by a wide margin. Government tells everyone they have to stay home most of the day, put masks on, maintain an arbitrary amount of distance between people while walking around. Restrictions make it impossible for many businesses to operate and maintain employees. The economy collapses. A rising record number of people are laid off or fired, more people of color than white, by a wide margin. Then, a white cop kills a black man for no reason at all on camera. It is an undeniably brutal event, and there is literally zero defense for this cop. But, lest we forget: white male cops kill black people all the time. 

This time though, everyone’s sitting at home, jobless, running out of money. Restaurants, bars, sports arenas, movie theaters, and concert venues are all closed indefinitely or running limited grab-and-go services only. The government has modified what Trevor Noah calls the societal contract, asking all of us, even / especially the underserved black community, to live with less privilege, and more restriction. There’s no reason to protest only on Friday and Saturday night when we’re all off work. For a lot of people, there is no work. Nowhere to go. Nothing to do. 

Covid-19 is projected by the CDC to kill somewhere on the order of between 60,000 to 180,000 people in America in the year 2020, assuming there is no means to provide a vaccine to anybody the entire year. 

For perspective on that, 60,000 people die annually of strokes in the US. My grandmother died of a stroke. 

Another 60,000 die of Alzheimer’s disease, which has never had a cure. My mother has Alzheimer’s. 

Cancer killed over 250,000 Americans in 2019. I had cancer twice - stage two and three lymphoma, in 2017 and 2018. The first round of chemotherapy, lasting half a year, did not cure it. I endured a 2nd year of more punishing chemotherapy as well as a Summer of hospitalization and a stem cell transplant. 

Heart disease killed almost 300,000 the same year. Heart disease is the leading cause of death for all men and women globally. Many people who have been declared dead due to covid would have died from existing heart disease complications, cancer complications, complications due to stroke, and other preexisting conditions. The medical community is not currently able to calculate how many covid-19 deaths, prior or projected, “substitute” for other deaths. This is considered a critical calculation by researchers, but it’s unlikely to be adequately measured until after covid-19 is no longer declared a crisis. 

Covid-19 is showing us that when humanity is united in common cause, rapid change is possible. None of the world’s problems are technically difficult to solve. They originate in human disagreement. A disease that does not even rank in the top 10 most deadly human diseases in history has become a rallying point. Governments around the world, large and small, have decided that this is The Crisis worth solving. There are common rules, guidelines, and changes accepted across populations of millions to try and limit the spread of this virus, although these rules have changed radically over the course of three months, and are used and enforced erratically and inconsistently. 

Nevertheless, great change has occurred in a very short time, and in the process, freedoms and personal liberties have been compromised. We walk around wearing mandatory masks covering half of our face. We are not allowed to walk into what few businesses are open, while other businesses are not permitted to operate at all. We can’t get close to strangers. Signs reminiscent of science-fiction movies blink on highways and bridges, telling us to turn our cars around and stay home. We are losing sovereignty over our bodies, we cannot hug, we cannot shake hands. 

All of this is in the name of “stopping the spread,” and there are vague assurances from government, without in many cases dates or deadlines, that this is all temporary “until the crisis subsides.” Meanwhile, the scientific community has quietly come to understand, in nearly unison agreement, that covid, much like the flu, the measles, or any number of now-vaccinatable diseases, is not going anywhere. At some point, covid is going to be a permanent fixture in society. We may all, in our own time, come to accept covid as not a crisis, but a fact of life.

While I wait for this to happen, I watch as my liberal California friends get on and firmly ride the covid restriction train. They’re on board 110%, gleefully overusing a term that at any other time in history would have been considered apocalyptic, “social distancing.” They’re in the process of diligently cooperating with the permanent institutionalizing of this social distance. They’re ready to accept the potential for more restriction: extended involuntary quarantine, restrictions on travel, the tracking of our life and movements by our government. 

It’s a peculiar time in my own life, because I usually understand these people. I don’t always agree with them; I’m not a Californian, I don’t truly belong here. I like to live here, usually. It makes me happy. It’s sunny, there are lakes and forests, and in more traditional times, there are also jobs, lots of them. But I was never one of the liberals. I grew up in Northern Florida, and spent enough years on the East Coast and the South and even abroad to understand more nuanced political and social viewpoints besides the very very very left coast. Lest you think I’m a Republican, I’m not registered with either political party, and have often (these days, usually) sided against them, especially on social and racial issues such as the building of the border wall (see this blog post I created a few months back during my visit to the El Paso / Juarez border).  

That said, when I watch Donald Trump on TV or read his Twitter account, I feel as angry as they do. I feel the same way about him: he’s an orange windbag, a racist, sexist asshole who was born into wealth and privilege on a staggering scale, and has never done anything with his life besides grab women and grab power. That’s why it was unsettling when Covid first became A Thing, and Trump started to make sense to me for possibly the first time since he was elected president. I started to relate to what I perceived as a surprisingly sensical, rational response. While the most liberal governors and mayors in the United States were joining CNN in declaring an instant state of emergency and drawing up elaborate systems of rules and restrictions, enlisting their graphics departments to make some charts that would dizzy even the most entrenched bureaucrat, Trump  said, calm down, this is not going to be the end of America. 

And in fact, if Covid DID come even close to being the end of America, it would not be because we all dropped dead of the virus like flies, which was just never going to happen. It would be because we overshot our compensation for the problem, shut down the economy, and put everybody out of work, causing our own crisis. What I saw in those moments is the best picture I ever got in my head of Donald Trump: a self-serving blowhard who, despite having the most backward social policy and no empathy for individual people whatsoever, is actually pretty good sometimes at broad economic decisions, and good at making practical choices when those choices just so happen to cosmically align with his own interests. To dig into Trump’s psyche: He knew Covid wasn’t going to kill every American, no matter what we did in response to it; he knew overreacting could (and did) cause economic collapse; he knew economy is money; Trump cares about money; so he urged restraint, and tried to stop us all from whacking small American business in the back of the knees.

Of course, there’s always a rude reawakening when it comes to Trump. As soon as his personal interests cause him to make a couple reasonable decisions, you forget that a broken clock is still only right twice a day and wrong every other minute. A sociopathic white cop kills a black man over a $20 bill in the midst of the covid crisis, people get understandably enraged and take to the streets, and Trump basically says and does all the wrong things. He’s shown a complete distaste for the protests, going so far as to have them forcibly moved so he could emerge from a bunker to take photo ops in front of a church. He’s reiterated his forceful yet vague and unsubstantiated claim of being a “law and order president.” He’s threatened to back that up by sicking the military (the military!! Sweet geezus) on American citizens. He wrote so many stupid things on Twitter I can’t even count them, JUST SINCE the protesting started 8 days ago. I don’t want to sift too deep into that hot nonsense, because I’ll never get the grease off my hands, but I think my favorite-least-favorite has got to be the now-infamous “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” In the words of Ryan George, wowowow. Wowow. Wow.

The bottom line is that I’ve hit this inescapable conclusion: liberal America has gone Covid-crazy. I would venture to say there is about half the country right now - the left half - that is ready and willing to give up their freedom to protect themselves and others from the virus. They have initiated a war on death itself, vowing to give up any basic human rights as a society to keep the elderly and immunocompromised alive a little longer. They have prioritized the elongation of life over the quality of life, putting a stake in the ground that essentially says, even a few extra days on this Earth, alive, is more important than the ability to hug your friend, eat at a restaurant, have a job, walk outside without a dystopian cover on your face. They’re willing to actually yell this at strangers, to accuse you of being a bad person in public if you dare to try and break Orwellian rules designed to extend life.

I fought cancer for a year and a half. I was brought to the brink of death, emaciated and unable to eat in a hospital bed. I had a conversation or two with death. I can tell you, there are scarier things than death. I don’t want to die; I cling to life now as I clung to life then. I’m terrified of death. But I cannot stop death, and I’m not ready to join a war on it, because we can’t win that war. Science and vaccines are miraculous things; it’s imperative we allow them to continue. Get your kids vaccinated, for fuck’s sake. Support the scientific community with every dollar you have to spend. But we are systemically destroying our economy, driving American people into record levels of depression and anxiety, doing irreparable damage to our mental health and welfare, forcing a fundamentally social creature - the human being - to live in isolation, indefinitely, with erratic and inconsistent signals as to when this will change. It’s making people crazy. Don’t believe me? Find a therapist, and ask them. 

Yes, Covid-19 is real, and it’s contagious. They haven’t developed a vaccine for it yet. If you’re a cancer patient, you should put a mask on. I had to put a mask on a lot when I was a cancer patient. It’s hard, it’s claustrophobic and suffocating, but it’s necessary for your short-term well-being. Corporations and the government should support and help those who are older or immunocompromised until science has found a way to successfully combat covid. 

But there are a lot of other healthy, young, active people who are supposed to be living the best days of their life, right now, even children who’ve been pulled out of schools, their parents expected to somehow take on the added burden of educating them on top of all the other overwhelming responsibilities of parenthood. Young, healthy people, of all walks of life, are wondering how they’re going to feed their families because they’re not allowed to go to their job, or don’t even have one anymore. In my hometown of Oakland, there are 1,510,271 people. About 15% of them are unemployed right now. That’s about 10% higher than before we collapsed our own economy. 10% of Oakland has lost their jobs since March - well over 100,000 people - in the name of protecting us from covid. Only 1/3rd of them have received stimulus checks promised to them by the same government that told businesses to stop operating. 

Meanwhile, covid has killed 97 people in all of Alameda County - that includes Oakland, Berkeley, Emeryville, and several other towns. Anyone want to calculate - what % of almost 2 million people, is 97? 

And while liberal America goes covid-crazy, they are simultaneously RIGHT ON POINT with the vital, urgent, long-overdue, I would say culturally-critical and dire-consequences-if-not-addressed-now issue of systemic racism in America. Conservative apologists, “blue lives matter” / “all lives matter” people, pro-Trumpers, I have never felt more estranged and distant from these people, many of whom I grew up with, family, friends. Every time I look up and see the police helicopters circling the sky, I think to myself, oh man, you are not getting it. The time is past when just a show of force and a temporary curfew is going to shut disenfranchised people up. As Trevor Noah puts it, the social contract is expired. The underrepresented aren’t going to put up with business as usual anymore. There are at least 5 or 10 major, global, crisis-level problems in the world RIGHT NOW that will have more lasting effects, do more damage and death than covid. There are literally ZERO more important issues than racism.

If I didn’t feel lonely and estranged enough already from “both sides of the aisle” in the wake of these twin problems, it gets even more complicated when I watch liberal America throw aside their sheltering in place in droves, allowing their protesting to instantly trump their distancing. Some of them are suddenly not even wearing masks. It’s all over national television, not to mention, right outside my door on Lake Merritt. I see you without the masks on. The same people who were yelling at me for not wearing a mask while I was jogging in my neighborhood, far away from you, respectfully keeping my distance. Now you’re marching in a sea of sweaty bodies, shouting at the top of your lungs, because racism has become more important to you than covid. And you know what? You’re not wrong. But I’m sorry; to me, you also look like a hypocrite. Not because you’re protesting; that’s absolutely the right thing to do. I have joined the protest, on several occasions. You look like a hypocrite because all you could talk about for weeks on your Facebook feed was covid, covid, covid. You would have yelled at anyone, even a stranger, for getting too close to your overprivileged white ass on the sidewalk. Social distancing! Shelter in place! Stay at home! Now I can’t find a word about covid anywhere on your profile. What happened, dude? 

And while you cherry-pick your favorite crisis of the moment, there are other global problems that have been completely sidelined. Not a word about them in the news, not a peep about them from either side, conservative, liberal. Five million children worldwide die every year of hunger. That’s an old stat from 2013. The best I could find recently is that in 2018, 159 million children were stunted and 50 million were wasted. Five million children is many times more than all the people young and old that have died from covid, yet no government on Earth has declared a state of emergency or asked that we radically alter our way of life to save them. 

Nor do we see a comparable level of alarm and action around suicide, which kills over a million people a year globally and 50,000 in the US alone - the mere tip of an iceberg of anxiety, depression and other mental illnesses that we are in our infancy in understanding and treating. There are similarly dire and despairing statistics around drug overdoses in the US, as well as obesity and heart disease, not to mention ecological collapse, all of which are killing people right now, will continue to kill people in steadily increasing amounts, and have been killing people for a long time before “corona” meant anything to the populace at large besides a brand of imported beer. Remember when we thought global warming was a bigger crisis in our time than any disease? Guess what: It still is. Sorry, covid. 

I feel alone in this country. I’m saddened and disheartened by our short-term memory loss. We seem ready, even eager to swing the pendulum widely for everything from personal liberties, to racism, to disease. We fight the right wars, sometimes. We’re fighting a war against racism right now, and it’s right to do so. It is where the eye of society should be looking. We fight wars on global warming, on obesity, on mental illness, sometimes. We should be fighting these wars all the time. But instead, sometimes we do spectacularly dumb stuff. 

Sometimes our president tells police to fire rubber bullets and smoke canisters at Americans so he can hold a bible upside down and say that when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Sometimes we collapse our economy to save our sick and infirm from one virus out of literally thousands that have come, are coming, and will come to get us. We fight wars we can and must win. And we fight wars we’ll never win. We’re so dazzlingly compassionate and careful, and so dazzlingly heartless and stupid at the same time. Until March of this year, even through my bouts with cancer, I never felt all of this so acutely, never saw it spiraling around me with such dizzying speed. 

Imagine what we could do if we responded to global climate change the way we responded to covid. Imagine if we worked from home, not because of a virus that will some day be as normal and scientifically managed  as the measles. Imagine if we worked from home because we finally woke up and realized that cars are literally choking the environment. Are we ever going to respond to climate change the way we instantly responded to covid? Why not? 

Imagine we regulated the fast food industry in response to obesity, the way we’re restricting all restaurants everywhere right now in order to stop the spread of coronavirus. Imagine if we put the same money we’ve dumped into fighting covid, and used even a fraction of it to better train cops, to improve hiring practices, modernize and overhaul the psychological testing of police, reform the prison system, find more intelligent ways to reform criminals besides our Victorian-era punishment system of jail and bail. Imagine what we could do, if we always cared about the RIGHT thing, the way we’re caring now about racism. 

I could go on and on, but several days of watching police troop transports roll down my street, walking around outside before curfew to survey the nightly looting damage, trying to keep my head down and away from every inevitably-white person who wants to tell me which of the 87 covid restrictions I’m not following…I’m exhausted. I’m all done being a human for now. I was never cut out to be a social justice warrior. I donate money every year to charity. I have given multiple times to the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society to fight cancer. Now I’m donating to a racial justice charity, because OF COURSE, how could anyone do otherwise at this time in history. My personal favorite is the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, because I believe (separate essay for another day) that the criminal justice system, the courts and prisons, are at the root of much of the racism epidemic - the real epidemic - in America. 

Other than all that…I’m going to sleep, to dream of being something else entirely besides one of these bizarre, be-masked two-legged human creatures. When I wake up, I’ll go down and sit with the geese on Lake Merritt, perhaps ask if I can join them and be a goose myself. They don’t seem to care very much about viruses in the air, nor are they holding each other down by the necks because their feathers are a different color.