Oh, those Michiganders and their angry protest against the COVID-19 lockdown.
I want to say to them, I’m with you.
No, not like that. I’m not with their crazy conspiracy theories and their anti-government paranoia and their macaroni-and-cheese-fueled brain functioning.
I’m with them to say, “Yes. You are humans, too. You are bat-shit crazy, but so is most of the world. Welcome to our dysfunctional family.”
Protesting the lockdown I’m sure will be about as effective as a Saturday-night, anti-Iran protest I joined in 1979, my freshman year of college, in the heat of the so-called “Hostage Crisis.”
After too many beers, someone on my dormitory floor said, “We should protest Iran.” Also being drunk, the rest of us considered it a swell idea, so we painted some cardboard and went marching down West Wisconsin Avenue, waving flags and giving hell to the Ayatollah.
Sizing up the threat posed by a few hundred suburban kids spouting patriotism and quickly running out of beer, the Milwaukee police allowed us to march on, blocking the cars of a few motorists likely also drunk, given the day and hour.
We never heard back from the Ayatollah.
In the Land of the Free, we’re free to espouse all kinds of nonsense. And we exercise that freedom like it expires tomorrow at noon.
I have a successful, college-educated, professional friend who believes the moon landing was faked. And another who believes the government – not a plane – blew up the Pentagon on Sept. 11.
About 10 years ago at Christmastime I picked up a Newsweek magazine featuring the enduring lore of the Virgin Mary. It reported that something like 86 percent of Americans believed in Christ’s virgin birth. Incredulous, I related this during a phone conversation, only to learn that my newspaper’s obituary writer also was on board with the phantom insemination.
As children, we are taught the importance of facts. We learn that science and reason lifted Western civilization out of the Dark Ages, and that modern medicine improved health, reduced child mortality and disease, and extended life expectancy.
Then we spend the rest of our lives adjusting to the reality that facts and science are no match for superstition and myth. They never will be, just as the truth will never be as attractive as a good lie. When I owned a newspaper, a friend would always remind me, “You can’t make good money at this. People don’t want the truth. They want a carefully crafted lie they can believe in.”
The germ theory of disease had been around for almost 1,000 years when a madman shot U.S. President James Garfield, but that didn’t stop Garfield’s doctors from jamming their dirty fingers into his bullet wounds. (Garfield died a few months later, not from his wounds but from poor medical care, including infection.)
History tells us that in past epidemics, even when most folks took precautions to distance themselves from others, some backslid after a spell, became careless and died as a result, or caused others to die.
As a species, we are an impatient bunch. We are quick to act and slow to learn. We want results and we’ll take to the streets to get them, even when they cannot be gotten.
So march on, proud Michiganders, hoist your flags and brandish your guns. Ridicule the men of science and the mathematicians and their models about how many might die and how soon. The coronavirus has a genetic code 30,000 digits long and defective vaccines can be more harmful than the virus itself, but don’t bother yourself with the messy details.
Lace up your black-and-white Nikes, drink the Kool-Aid and have a good trip. You and your president are part of a long, proud tradition in America that’s not going away anytime soon.