FIRES, ETC.

2 September 2021

I had lunch with my friend Kathleen today.  We spent a lot of time talking about the fires in California right now, especially what is happening in the Lake Tahoe area.  She is part of a condo up there and the fire, if it gets that far, is a danger to their place.  They have been told to evacuate.

The ironic thing is that her place is on the south side of the lake.  Our condo is on the north side of the lake, where there is no fire danger and not even any hazardous air to breathe.  Our air here today isn't bad (it's "moderate") but it has been at the "hazardous" level this week.  We are masking when we go outside, not only for COVID but for the air we have to breathe as well!

The biggest fire right now has burned over 200,000 acres and they say it is only 20% "contained," whatever that is (Kathleen says that her fireman friend says that means the amount of green that has been burned and can't be burned any more).

We also talked about COVID and the problems were are seeing in this country.  She had a "close acquaintance" ("I wouldn't exactly call him a friend") who decided not to get vaccinated ... and died of COVID a week or so ago, admitting to her that he had been stupid not to get the vaccine. 

Kathleen went into a store wearing a mask this week and a man wearing a MAGA hat came up to her and yelled at her to take her mask off immediately.

I don't understand the problem that people have with wearing masks to (a) keep from catching COVID, and (b) prevent them from passing the virus along to someone else.  These people wear shoes in restaurants because they are expected to.  They wear ties in fancy restaurants because they can't go in without a tie.  They don't smoke indoors because the rules say you can't.  They wear seat belts because the police will give them a ticket if they don't. They take their shoes off at the airport because they have to go through the screening.  They drive the speed limit that the police has set up.  They don't park in spaces painted red.  There are all sorts of things we have to do because the law says we must, and yet somehow wearing a mask to prevent the spread of a deadly virus is so odious someone would scream at my friend that she has to take her mask off RIGHT NOW.  And a governor refuses to give any money to schools that require their students to wear masks.

I also got a letter from a pen pal this week who says she probably won't get vaccinated.  She has done research and discovered that more people die of pneumonia than die of COVID so it's not really that big a deal.  If everyone felt about vaccines the way some people now feel about the COVID vaccine, we would still be fighting polio, diptheria, pertussis, tetanus, chicken pox, shingles measles, mumps, rubella, HPV, hepatitis and other diseases.  So what's so bad about a vaccine that has been proven to either prevent people from catching a deadly disease, or, if they do catch it. will only have a mild case of it.

People are so afraid of what might be in the vaccine yet will take Ivermectin (a horse pill) because someone decided it would cure COVID.

My pen pal has adult children.  I wonder if they received their vaccinations when they were young.