There is, in my Buddhist / Stoic slamdance of a daily practice, a reminder that what other people claim is “common sense” may be maddening, but it’s also what they earnestly believe and that they got to those beliefs through some combination of experience, innate leanings, and conscious embrace of ideas.
Sometimes, though, ya just can’t.
John Conway died of COVID-19 this weekend. If you don’t know who he is, that’s fine; let’s just say that he’s been a background character in my life since the last 1970s; he invented the mathematical game called Life, and introduced me to automata theory, something that would fascinate me on and off for the rest of my life. The Regular Expression Engine that I’ve been working on for the past year is an automata-based toolkit.
When I mentioned how sad this was to some friends of mine on Zoom, most of them highly liberal, the general reaction was “82 is a good run” and “Would you be sad if he had died of the flu?”
Yes. And so would you. It would have been something perfectly normal and ordinary, and therefore saddening. It’s also something we as a civilization fight against every year, with flu shots and reminders to wash hands and a public hygiene program designed to minimize the deaths and economic harm caused by the influenza virus. Our civilization spends millions tracking the emergent course of the flu every year.
We didn’t have that for COVID-19. COVID-19 is called novel because we’ve never seen this before.
COVID-19 has a death rate that, for the United States, is currently tracking as thirty times deadlier than influenza, it’s transmission rate is much higher than influenza, and its environmental persistence seems to be higher than influenza as well. We’ve seen cases where, out of 121 members of a choir, a single asymptomatic person infect 45 of them, killing two. If the flu had 37% infection rate and a 2% death toll, nobody would ever leave their homes during flu season either.
But here’s the thing. 82 years may count “as a good run,” especially for an academic as accomplished as John Conway. But “a good run” doesn’t mitigate the simple fact that he died, and his prodigious and productive life was cut short by something that simply didn’t have to happen.
And this is the spiritual grotesquerie that even my most liberal acquaintances are embracing: “Well, the olds, they’ve lived a good life, and this would have happened to them eventually.” Yeah, eventually. COVID-19 cuts a life short of that eventually. So do a lot of other diseases, and we fight them as ferociously as we can (well, except for here in the USA, where if it’s not profitable to someone, we don’t bother too much). This staying home thing? This is how we deal with COVID-19 until it’s over.
Be compassionate. Stop sneering at people who want to save their parents and grandparents from dying with a ventilator down their throats or drowning in the pus their lungs create trying to fight the virus. And stop making any spiritual and emotional gymnastics to tell others that a death, any death at all, from COVID-19 is “okay.”
Sometimes, though, ya just can’t.
John Conway died of COVID-19 this weekend. If you don’t know who he is, that’s fine; let’s just say that he’s been a background character in my life since the last 1970s; he invented the mathematical game called Life, and introduced me to automata theory, something that would fascinate me on and off for the rest of my life. The Regular Expression Engine that I’ve been working on for the past year is an automata-based toolkit.
When I mentioned how sad this was to some friends of mine on Zoom, most of them highly liberal, the general reaction was “82 is a good run” and “Would you be sad if he had died of the flu?”
Yes. And so would you. It would have been something perfectly normal and ordinary, and therefore saddening. It’s also something we as a civilization fight against every year, with flu shots and reminders to wash hands and a public hygiene program designed to minimize the deaths and economic harm caused by the influenza virus. Our civilization spends millions tracking the emergent course of the flu every year.
We didn’t have that for COVID-19. COVID-19 is called novel because we’ve never seen this before.
COVID-19 has a death rate that, for the United States, is currently tracking as thirty times deadlier than influenza, it’s transmission rate is much higher than influenza, and its environmental persistence seems to be higher than influenza as well. We’ve seen cases where, out of 121 members of a choir, a single asymptomatic person infect 45 of them, killing two. If the flu had 37% infection rate and a 2% death toll, nobody would ever leave their homes during flu season either.
But here’s the thing. 82 years may count “as a good run,” especially for an academic as accomplished as John Conway. But “a good run” doesn’t mitigate the simple fact that he died, and his prodigious and productive life was cut short by something that simply didn’t have to happen.
And this is the spiritual grotesquerie that even my most liberal acquaintances are embracing: “Well, the olds, they’ve lived a good life, and this would have happened to them eventually.” Yeah, eventually. COVID-19 cuts a life short of that eventually. So do a lot of other diseases, and we fight them as ferociously as we can (well, except for here in the USA, where if it’s not profitable to someone, we don’t bother too much). This staying home thing? This is how we deal with COVID-19 until it’s over.
Be compassionate. Stop sneering at people who want to save their parents and grandparents from dying with a ventilator down their throats or drowning in the pus their lungs create trying to fight the virus. And stop making any spiritual and emotional gymnastics to tell others that a death, any death at all, from COVID-19 is “okay.”
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}