I had to listen to a truly Ignorant conversation at work on Friday.
Three reasonably intelligent women chatting on about the 'Hoax'. "All the numbers are inflated, all the deaths are for other reasons, the danger has already passed, the hospitals are empty, we should have a right to congregate and shop and not wear masks if we want to," blah blah blah.
These are not Trumpanzees. My boss is not a wise person, but is indeed technically skilled with a college degree. She's about to marry a man with four children (when she admits she hates children), and although she opposes Trump her fiancee is a right-wing libertarian with a PhD working in the medical device business who believes Covid 19 is a creation of the Chinese, so she kind of leans that way now. It's sad to watch her take this path.
My other two coworkers are both low-information, confused mothers of young children. Friday afternoon I was working hard while trying not to listen to the most bizarre display of superstitious ignorance I've been exposed to in awhile. It reminded me of people I heard in my childhood talking about blacks and women and gay people -- the wholly fact-free innocence of bookless, ahistorical nonsense.
They might as well have been three women from the 1300's blaming the bubonic plague on the Jews -- there was not a single bit of wisdom between them, and the confidence with which they spoke so openly in an ostensibly professional environment was the icing on the crap-cake.
After awhile I couldn't stand any more of the drivel being spewed across the cubicle wall, and so I put in my headphones and blazed away at the task before me. At the end of the afternoon, a coworker approached me and asked if we could walk out together.
He'd heard what I'd heard, and was as traumatized as I was by it. It made us both feel hopeless, although it was just an anecdotal bit of life -- the polls say differently, and I think most Americans are becoming quite Woke. But it was shocking to hear it actually said out loud in person. There was no recourse to respond -- they were too deep into utter idiocy, and it would have driven them further in instead of helping enlighten in any way.
This happened just a few days after a former business associate of mine (a CEO from the Bronx) called me and told me he'd gone through Covid in March. He described the symptoms in gruesome detail -- fourteen days, during four of which he was certain he was going to die. The hospital told him to stay home, nothing to be done for him. His wife and children were asymptomatic, but he had a bleeding rash, a feeling of drowning, racking body aches and cramps that would not let go. He's permanently marked by the experience.
This is a man who ran five miles a day before he caught it -- now he can't make it to the end of the block without wheezing. His doctor says he won't fully recover for a year or more.
Darwin haunts this nation now. Information is the coin of survival. And those who possess the ability to critically think and study the science, and to act rationally and remain balanced in the chaos will have a much higher chance to emerge unscathed.
But those three women with children they are responsible for -- and all the other people who think this is so much media hype, overblown political rhetoric, baseless fear -- risk their lives and their children's lives, and to a certain extent, all of our lives.
The GOP's war on education for the past fifty years is going to kill more Americans than any other force in our history. It may be a difficult and seemingly intangible link to make, but it seems like plain fact to me -- purposefully spreading ignorance for power's sake has never been a long-term strategy for survival for any culture in human history.
Quite the opposite.
= new reply since forum marked as read
And those who possess the ability to critically think and study the science, and to act rationally and remain balanced in the chaos will have a much higher chance to emerge unscathed. . . 
The GOP's war on education for the past fifty years is going to kill more Americans than any other force in our history. It may be a difficult and seemingly intangible link to make, but it seems like plain fact to me -- purposefully spreading ignorance for power's sake has never been a long-term strategy for survival for any culture in human history.'
a littlr more, a little less?
Pleas..Even the "enlightened" institutional atheism of the Soviet Union has, in large part, gone back to Russian Orthodoxy. .Seventy One percent now identify as 'Russian Orthodox....Looks like a LOT of us will be "going back to the Dark Ages" 
https://religionandpolitics.org/2018/10/16/russias-journey-from-orthodoxy-to-atheism-and-back-again/
why could you only find four with relatively small populations?
.Nice try. 
Last edited Mon May 25, 2020, 03:34 PM - Edit history (1)
to support your claim. 
wake up is to put videos of people suffering from this on the news. Every day. Show them gasping for air, show the rashes, show the faces of people wracked with pain. Meanwhile, as long a republicans insist on gathering in large groups without masks, maybe they will kill themselves off and not take too may of us with them.
ignorance and conscientious stupidity."
I had to read your post aloud to hubby who's working at the kitchen table.
I've managed, I think, to enlighten a couple of CT's; at least I made them think by sending info they had not seen or thought of - they were actually low-info dems (difficult to imagine but they exist 
).
like spending time with my in-laws. but also so very depressing.
Yes, Darwin haunts this nation now ....
