Patriots...

Like most everyone, I'll accept a reasonable calculated risk to restore some semblance of normalcy to my work and social lives. The problem is, we don't know enough about COVID-19 to make that calculation: virtually all our initial assumptions about the virus have proven overoptimistic: it spreads faster (absent social distancing), kills more - a lot more, and more deviously, at that - and isn't leaving behind the kinds of antibodies that reliably prevent its return, wet blanketing the expectation of herd immunity. And do we need to be reminded? Even if we knew everything there is to know about COVID-19, we're nowhere near ready to cope with it: test kits, personal protective equipment, ventilators, hospital beds, trained staff - all are in woefully short supply. We have no vaccine, nor even a therapeutic: Remdesivir looks promising, but even if it sails through its clinical trials, how long before it's available in quantity?

So, no calculated risk at this point. Our only two options are hunkering down to buy time, or taking uncalculated risks, more commonly known as "stupid chances," and not just for ourselves, but for our families, the essential workers whose lives we jeopardize by our presence, the first responders who lug us into the ambulance, the medical staff who risk everything to preserve our reckless, heedless, carcasses, the mortician who ferries us to our final destination, the Cordon Bleu dropout who slams the crematorium door in an emphatic "Good riddance."

I tried presenting this viewpoint to some of the gun-brandishing "patriots" who invaded Maine's capital, Augusta, last Saturday, only to be informed, in varying degrees of condescension, that I was nothing but a fake-news-addicted, blue-pilled, snowflake. (They're right about the blue pills: fistfuls of Advil gel caps, to be precise.) Instead of reasoned, informed, life-regarding alternatives to Governor Janet Mills' lock-down edict, onlookers were subjected to feet-stamping tantrums about MY RIGHTS!!! (To do what? Visit misery and death on your fellow citizens?) And ardent, if crudely expressed, desires to physically make love to the Honorable Ms Mills.

Maybe I need to look this up, but I'm pretty sure a patriot is someone who willingly foregoes rights and pleasures for the good of her countrymen, and not someone who thinks the world revolves around ME! ME! ME! In times of war - which the President says we're in (and for once, I agree) - we have no problem requiring the flower of our citizenry to accept death or mutilation as the price of national survival; when did staying home and bingeing Hulu for a couple of months become too much to ask? Last month, apparently...