Nobody asked me, but … when it comes to the pandemic

It ain’t over yet.

Way too many people are acting like the COVID threat went away as soon as the calendar flipped to January 1, 2021.

The normal you used to have is gone.

The pandemic has exposed the cracks in many institutions, especially education.

The pandemic demonstrated that we didn’t need a lot of things we thought we did. We’ve learned that many offices aren’t necessary. Ditto for routine consultations with a physician.

We’ve found that we don’t have to travel at all for some things.

We’ve learned that too many elected officials simply act irresponsibly. How could you vote on a 5000-word bill when the ink was just barely dry?

My favorite bit of pork buried in those 5000 pages is money to require the intelligence services to tell us everything they know about UFOs within 6 months. I’m not making that up. I couldn’t make that up.

I won’t be taking the vaccine right away. I’m nervous whenever we rush to get something done in research or government. It usually results in racing past warning flags in the quest for profit and credit.

The pandemic raged and small business dropped like flies. But the pharmaceutical industry and tech are doing quite well, thank you.

The laws of Human Nature haven’t been repealed. We still need to be connected to each other and the magic of technology is not enough. Some of us revel in working from home. Others think it’s the worst possible way to work.

-o0o-

Jimmy Cannon and Me

If there was one writer who inspired me to want to be a writer, it was Jimmy Cannon. I discovered him because I liked to read the paper while I ate my dinner before starting work after school. That meant I read an afternoon paper in the early 1960s. So, I’d come up out of the subway, grab the Journal-American at the newsstand, then stop at the deli for the sandwich I ate for dinner. Every night I ate the sandwich and read the paper, starting with Jimmy Cannon’s column.

I loved the way he wrote. It was clean and sharp, full of insight and opinion. Jimmy Cannon was a sportswriter, but he wrote about everything, especially in his occasional columns, “Nobody asked me but.”  I wanted to write like Jimmy Cannon. I wanted to write as well as Jimmy Cannon. I’m still trying.

This post uses the title Cannon used for his most interesting occasional column. It is a pale imitation of the originals.