Thomas Fleming
Thomas Fleming is president of the Fleming Foundation. He is the author of six books, including The Morality of Everyday Life and The Politics of Human Nature, as well as many articles and columns for newspapers, magazines,and learned journals. He holds a Ph.D. in Classics from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and a B.A. in Greek from the College of Charleston. He served as editor of Chronicles: a Magazine of American Culture from 1984 to 2015 and president of The Rockford Institute from 1997-2014. In a previous life he taught classics at several colleges and served as a school headmaster in South Carolina
I still struggle to get worked up over the Corona numbers. Working with numbers for a living, I can’t help but look at the daily death toll for something like Tuberculosis (supposedly around 3,000 per day) and scratch my head over the panic with COVID 19. Or even looking at Italy, which is rocked the hardest in Europe, and I think that 47 thousand infected is still only 0.08% of the population of Italy. I guess what’s a little unnerving is how fragile the health care systems are that such a relatively minor uptick in the percentage of the population being sick can bring everything to a grinding halt.
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Something I find interesting is the almost pathological need to get tested. Everyone in the media and on Twitter and whatnot is clamoring for more testing and is angry because celebrities are getting tested and yelling at Trump because there aren’t more tests – but it’s not as if the tests actually CURE anything. Even if one assumes they’re always correct (a big if), all a test says is, at this moment in time, you don’t happen to have that particular virus. I think it’s almost like a pathological reaction to being forced to live in a gray area for a people that have been raised, since birth, to think in terms of black & white. They know there are good guys and bad guys; slavery is evil and anyone who thinks the Founding Fathers or the Confederacy aren’t evil is wrong; Poor people are saints and Rich People are devils; Global Warming is a clear cut reality and those who think otherwise are bad; people with transgender issues are victims and anyone who doesn’t support them is a bigot . . . etc. Suddenly, these binary people have to exist in a world where they don’t know if they’re a victim or safe. They want a test desperately so they can know what label to wear proudly on social media (#selfless-quarantineer or #Corona-Martyr).
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Meanwhile, us homeschoolers are rolling right along as if nothing’s happening because, well, down where we are nothing is happening. Go figure.
The common cold is caused by many different viruses, right? So why is corona not just another common cold?
Who got the whole world turned upside down over something like that, and why?
I’d say it’s an uncommon cold. Some years ago I came down with what I thought was the worst influenza in my life–I was bed-ridden more or less for two weeks and the coughing held on for much longer. When I finally checked out the symptoms and matched them with what was going round, it turned out to be a cold. That’s when I discovered that some colds are worse than most flus. This corona virus is in that class.
democrats capable of shame? you’d better rethink that one.
The neurosis at the grocery store is tangible. Don’t you know that’s THEIR food! I’m sure Pritzker gets first dibs on the Little Debbie snack cakes however.