Feelings. They’ll deceive you every time. Yet people project them like projectile sneezes. Can we please enact some social distancing to this kind of BS?
As Radiohead sings, “just ‘cos you feel it, doesn’t mean it’s there.”
Daily, we are inundated with these projections. The morning news is pregnant with stories, all designed to touch our feelings, but almost never does it appeal to our intellects—our capacity to think. “Stupid news” I call it.
Coronavirus-related news seems to be tracking in a narrative rut. The talking head says, “there are now _______ confirmed coronavirus virus cases in ________.” Fill in the number and fill in the state. They’re all the same.
If we asked better questions, would we have better answers? I think so (regardless of what you feel).
From this article on “smarter” testing, I liked this because it gets at what kind of information we need:
Epidemiology is a bit like baseball. Knowing that a ball player has gotten 134 hits isn’t that informative. What is informative is knowing that those 134 hits were made during 335 at-bats, which translates into a batting average of .400. But we can only know the batting average if we know the player’s total number of at bats and hits. It’s the same thing for the coronavirus: We need to know the number of all tests in in each age group and each locale, as well as the number of positive ones.
Merely reciting the number of cases in a state, a nation, or the world, along with deaths, is a litany that lacks any real context. It does elicit fear and even hysteria. Perhaps that’s what’s pushing the uniformity of the current narrative, I do not know. It’s maddening to me, someone who, as a writer, truly believes that words do matter.
On Facebook, someone posted some absolute balderdash, equating what people are feeling societally as “grief.” Unless you’ve truly gone through the depths of despair and hopelessness that grief and loss visits on you when you lose the dearest person in your life, someone you loved more than your own life, then you can’t talk about grief with authority. And if you can’t then shut the fuck up! In fact, if you’ve ever experienced the kind of grief that my wife and I have been living through for 3+ years, you’d have never posted such bunkum. It’s hurtful, triggering, and it makes me like you even less—and I don’t like humans much at all.
Yet, despite my never-ending disdain for humanity, I’m cursed with empathy for them. What the fuck! Caring about others, even when you don’t particularly like them is akin to a curse.
The only place I find solace and relief is when I have my guitar in hand. Who knows when even that won’t suffice, as we’re forced to endure the equivalent of house arrest forced on us by a bunch of so-called experts who are rarely ever right. But we trust them. And the sheeple enable it.
Note: I actually stole the title of today’s blog post from this book, one I just learned about and plan to read.
