Month: February 2022

Finally … after practically two years of mandated masks at work and elsewhere, we’re being told that wearing them is now our choice.  It’s up to us!  Basically 70 percent of us, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, has no need to wear masks all the time especially at large gatherings like work and school.

It’s hallelujah time, paralleled to the COVID-19 vaccine!

Why so glum?  You’re not gonna join me in stripping off the mask, tossing it in the trash, and filing the bag(s) of unused sanitary masks under M or H or P?  We learned all sorts of medical terms during this pandemic.  There were a lot of reasons why I didn’t choose the medical profession: 1) blood and gore, and 2) wearing masks.  Even medical professionals never wore masks all the time, just during surgery.  Remember when dentists never wore masks until AIDS came along?

So in some semblance of restored normalcy, I can commence to wearing lipstick again and relying on facial expressions like smiling to let everyone know I’m not being sarcastic or in a bad mood.  And now everyone will see I’ve been straightening my teeth during the masked years.  Yeah, a few more weeks to go yet.  But I’d rather everyone know than continue wearing masks at work … 8 – 10 hours Mondays through Fridays … changing to a fresh one after lunch … spraying medicated mist and chewing medicated mint discs to clean my breath … and after washing my face with a cleansing cloth because wearing a mask all day created skin problems.  I predict that two years of wearing masks at work and other places—which meant breathing in all the carbon dioxide we’re naturally supposed to be exhaling … into the air—will someday be found to cause assorted lung problems including cancer.  Go ahead, call me Debby Downer.

Through foggy lenses

I wear glasses, just like our national health leader Dr. Fauci.  I remember him saying on 60 Minutes early in the pandemic that things would not get so bad as to mandate everyone wear masks.  What a laugh seeing how things turned out.  Besides getting used to shallow breathing and itchy runny nose, my glasses fogged when wearing a mask, no matter how tightly I clamped the nose wire.  So I had to decide which is more important: seeing clearly when among a crowd like grocery shopping and working and walking or going along with the mandate so that others do not get sick (this thought after the vaccines … and booster).  As for my own fears, I felt a sitting duck in the months before the vaccine, and it did take a few more months before I was permitted to get them (yes, two).

But I was never afraid I’d die from COVID-19.  I don’t know why I was so confident.

President Trump was right when he said: We told everyone to go home, lock the doors and hide under the bed.  I was never that afraid of this virus.  We were not in biological warfare.  We could go outdoors and not choke to death on chemicals or fall ill from radiation sickness.  I knew all along that the great majority of humanity would not die from this little ol’ virus.  Why didn’t everyone feel the same way? 

We’ve lived through lots of pandemics and epidemics.  Remember Ebola?  That was gruesome and scary and totally deadly.  HIV and AIDS?  I was a young adult in college when that came down on the planet.  Back then I learned two things: that new viruses evolve and some stay and some can be eradicated by vaccines; and that there is a Big Reason From Way Up On High that pandemics come along every so often.  We are to learn from them.  They have something very important to teach us.

The reason with HIV/AIDS was so obvious.  Remember how mean and cruel all the prejudiced people, many self-proclaimed Christians, became when having to deal with others who had AIDS?  Our society devolved into mass hysteria.  The whole ordeal was played out on and in the news, this before the 24-hour cycle.  Unlike the belly aching over hearing too much about COVID-19, back in the 1980s I don’t think anyone said, “I’m so sick and tired of hearing about AIDS.”  In fact, we wanted to know everything about it; every day there was something newly discovered about the disease.  In comparison to AIDS, COVID-19 is a blip on the screen of human history.

But both AIDS and COVID-19 divided us as Americans.  With AIDS, people either supported gays and those who developed AIDS, or you abhorred them, blamed and condemned them—at the time sick and dying people, young and old, even children.  See, AIDS was in the blood supply, and a lot of people who had had surgeries before AIDS was known ended up with the disease.  You can see why everyone was so frightened, more than we’ve been with COVID-19.  It took a few years and a lot of educating Americans, but eventually our nation changed.  Our society’s view on homosexuality changed.  AIDS made everyone think about … throwing stones.

Our society opened its collective heart to the many victims of AIDS.  We became a better people for understanding that when it comes to sexuality and drug addiction, there is nothing we need to understand.  We’re all just human beings down here.  Live and let live, that was the lesson from AIDS.

What is the Big Reason for COVID-19, which is really a strain of previous viruses that infect the lungs?  We’re just as divided as we were over AIDS long ago.  Could this pandemic be teaching us that like it or not we’re all connected to one another and indeed our brother’s keeper?  So we have to do things like wear masks to help each other stay healthy and avoid a spreading deadly virus.  Some have chosen to ‘follow the science’ and tried to prevent the virus from spreading by wearing masks and getting vaccinated.  Others chose to pass on yet another vaccine, even if mandated at work, even if doctors say it’s for the common good.  They avoided crowds and working in a large office but saw the benefit in wearing masks interestingly enough.  Each side has demonstrated remarkable bravery and the price of freedom as a few of the ardent anti-vax have died from the disease.

Perhaps this pandemic has taught us to avoid thinking we’ve got life figured out.  Maybe we had become too smug and needed a lesson in humility.  Maybe we needed a lesson in accepting one another whatever individual decision about how best to deal with this pandemic.  Maybe the lesson is not so much “Live and let live” anymore but “Live and let die.”

Anyone who’s a fan of the songs by Neil Young, Joni Mitchell & Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young think the same thing: They must be intense.  They all happen to be at the top of my ‘playlist’ along with the Beatles, of course, and Pink Floyd.  I like a lot of music, but when it comes to the art of songwriting, the three at the start of this blog are certainly the most influential.  And though we’ve aged since their heyday in the early 1970s, I still respect them not only for their song style, wordcraft, instrumentation, voices and melodies but also for their social views.  Maybe they’re not the most politically renowned, but I know where they stand.  How?  Because I’ve listened to their songs … for years.

When Neil Young called on Spotify to stop ‘airing’ his songs alongside one major podcaster whose views Young believed to be dangerous for society as a whole—even possibly contributing to deaths—I knew where he was coming from.  Then Mitchell joined Young along with his pals CSN and even a folkie singer/songwriter from modern times India.Arie.

Their collective ire was not over the free speech of big-time podcaster Joe Rogan but his continued insistence against the Covid-19 vaccine.  That was the focus of these songwriters and others, with India.Arie calling attention to Rogan’s use of racial epithets.  Rather quickly Spotify developed some sort of compromise allowing Rogan to continue his extremely popular and big-budget podcast but with a content warning.

I say a lot about how none of us really knows the famous people, those who move about in circles to which most of us have no link or entrance.  But it’s different with singer-songwriters.  They bare their souls poetically and capture our attention.  If they are truly talented, musically innovative and lucky, their songs and the message of each one air nationwide and nowadays are easily heard around the world.

So I wasn’t surprised to hear Neil Young and colleagues gave Spotify an ultimatum. 

Yeah, a lot of people didn’t know who they are or were, not even one song by Joni Mitchell.  The Baby Boomer generation, the largest loudest strongest of American seniors, knows these singers and their music, a lot of it played routinely on classic rock stations.  The words & melodies are seared into the hearts & minds of a generation like snapshots in black-and-white and fading color.  Don’t knock music fans.  The bond is stronger than politics.  Singer/songwriters say—and beautifully so—what millions of people think and feel and know to be true.

And the most important thing to remember about Neil Young, Joni Mitchell & CSNY is they are paid nothing every time their songs are played on Spotify.

Again we see how the great Baby Boomer generation, with the first batch now in their mid to late 70s, keep rockin’.  They called out Spotify.  They got fans to wake up to what’s going down.  And it’s not about money.

Free speech is a beautiful thing.  No one knows that more than these singer-songwriters. But all of us Boomers know free speech does not mean someone can yell “Fire!” in a crowded theater when there is no fire, you know as a joke.  Why?  Because people will get hurt running over each other to leave the fire that does not exist.  Only sociopaths would laugh at the outcome.  It’s irresponsible.  It’s mean.  It endangers society, other people.

Like it or not, we can’t say whatever we want whether true or not.  Boomers have learned that the hard way … as we’ve rebuilt relationships with loved ones when politics got too divisive, as we’ve raised children and grandchildren, as we’ve pursued our life’s work and hobbies, as we live beside neighbors of various ethnicities and cultures and spiritual practices, as we deal each day with other people one on one.  

Somewhere along the line in this internet world, our right of free speech has been … abused.  Today it’s hard for people to know what is true and false, real and fake, even good and bad.  With every click, anything we read or see or hear has to be vetted, checked and checked again to substantiate: Is this the truth?

When it came to just sitting back and allowing misinformation to spread unchecked and unchallenged, old Neil Young, who is the father of two children with cerebral palsy, had to take a stand.  Nothing new.  Songwriters do it all the time, whether or not anyone is listening.