‘Either choice is going to kill a lot of people.’ Being the Decider in a pandemic
Choices sometimes are not. They just look like choices. Zella moved down from Greasy Creek when she was old and settled in across the street from us. My son mowed her yards two times. One time she gave him a quarter and the other time she gave him a jar of pickled pigs feet. She came over one time and asked Cheryl whether she would rather have a dish or a towel for Christmas. When Cheryl said she would like the towel, Zella declared in her low and growly voice: “A dish would last longer.”
The whole idea is to choose something which will last the longest and we have put it to our seers to choose between starvation, behind the curtain, or disease, in the box. The first question is who gets to decide. W Bush gave himself the Swarzeneggeresque title of The Decider. Our current tenant in our D.C. house wants to decide lower case, but not be caught doing it, because either choice is going to kill a lot of people, and not just the old. His political future depends on things opening up and that can be his only choice. Bye bye Fauci. Trump can only hope that the wave will not become a tsunami before November.
I do have a lot of answers and will provide them to the President and I will continue to tell him the truth right up until I am fired for it. My advice would be for the government’s next stimulus to be a free rotary tiller, hoe and some of Bonnie’s plants to every family in America. Except those here illegally. I don’t know what they are going to eat. But all those new farmers would have to have some ground. So I would make all those gigantic farms that got the thirty billion Trump gave them to buy them off over the China tariff thing cough up that money and use it to acquire small farms across America by condemnation and march those people right out of the city and back onto the land. Soon we would be a nation of peasant farmers able to stay away from one another. Each farm would have its own little safe ‘wet market’ where the slaying of the meat occurs. Being peasant farmers once would have seemed like an unworthy goal.
On a local level, there are creative ways to approach the New Perhaps. With modern technology, the Stoopcats will play on. Games will be in an empty stadium, but sixty thousand people, unless we are playing some school with a hyphen on a rainy day, a few less, will be hooked together, like those interminable music sessions on the nightly news. When a fan cheers at home all would cheer and hear all the others and loudspeakers would broadcast the cheers to the players and spur them on. Each fan would have a couple pixels, I think that is what you call them, and by putting them all together on a screen it will be just like being there. You will have to provide your own smells. We will miss those parking lot smells. Nothing, not even one, tastes as good as a hamburger smells on a grill.
We have got to figure the basketball thing out. The thing is, these new rules that let college ball players make money off local endorsements will mean that some poor tall eighteen year old kid can make millions of dollars a year in Lexington, and may decide to stay for four years because of the income. How do you recruit then?
Larry Webster is a Pikeville attorney.