02 May 2009
In the Moment
The Government of Hong Kong is taking no crap off the New Flu. Masked constabulary surrounded the Metropark Hotel yesterday imposed a strict quarantine on the three hundred guests and workers who were within the high-rise hotel.
The authorities had been tipped off that a young Mexican man had been in the hotel briefly before checking himself into a local hospital with the first confirmed case of the bug. They were taking no chances, even as we appear to be breathing a deeper sigh here that the bug is just The Flu, albeit a new version of it.
I’m not completely in the moment yet, but to the best of my limited capability, I think that the death toll in the States stands at “one” for the pandemic. I am sad for the 22-month-old who succumbed to the disease down in Texas, and for the toddler’s folks. You would have to be hard-hearted not to.
But according to the CDC, the ordinary version of the influenza bug kills 36,000 Americans every year, which amounts to nearly a hundred citizens a day. That is normal; when you adjust for the seasonal nature of the infectious cycle, the daily numbers would be much higher in the fall and winter.
We seem to take that in stride, just as we do the almost equivalent number of motorists and pedestrians who died in the US annually. Between the flu and vehicular mischance, that is two hundred a day, and I am not even going to include the 30,000-odd gun related deaths.
So, on the whole, I suppose it is best to stay in the moment, and not think about the ways that nearly 300 fellow citizens leave this world each day.
That isn’t even close to the total. I mean, heart disease, stroke or falling are much more likely ways to go, and a cool chart reminded me that the chances of dying are exactly one-to-one, though not on any given day.
Trying to get to the bottom of the flu thing- you know, the cost benefit of leaving Tunnel Eight today to do the chores or go back to bed- I realized that in the aggregate, there are approximately 4 million births annually in the US versus 2.4 million deaths, which suggests that you are far more likely to be born than die.
To get to those numbers, I passed through a young woman’s horrific passing in her Daddy’s borrowed Porche 911- an unsettling imagery inversion of "Ferris Buller’s Day Off"- and a 1966 training film from the Berkeley, California, Police Department on how to deliver a baby in the back of a car.
I don’t know about you, but I felt better after the affirmation of life. Not a great deal better, but still all right.
I agree with Associate Justice of the Supreme Court David Souter, who is determined to leave the swampy bottom and by the Potomac and head back to the mountains of his beloved New Hampshire. Apparently he figures he is still enough in the moment to have some life yet, and would rather spend it someplace he likes, rather than here.
The stakes are high about who will be nominated to replace him, and he clearly was hanging on until such time as he felt a liberal would be named to replace him.
They say a liberal is a conservative who hasn’t been mugged yet, but that is not the case in Justice Souter’s case. He is a nice guy, from what I have been able to tell. He has a place over near the waterfront that he uses in the court season.
It is that little slice of the South West District that remained at the confluence of the Anacostia and Potomac rivers after Arlington County was thrown back to Virginia as unmanageable. It is north of Fort McNair, where the government sent me to the Industrial College to get a master’s degree, and south of the beginning of the slums of SE Washington.
The Judge was kind enough to come over regularly and share his experiences with the students. At that time, he had been on the High Court for about six years, and had abandoned his “stealth justice” profile and revealed himself as a free-thinker. The conservatives in town were outraged. I thought it was pretty cool to see that he was a regular guy.
He used the Fort as a safe place to exercise. Walking over one day, he got robbed.
They say that Judge Souter didn’t like it here in Washington, and I imagine the disturbing moment of the robbery, when anything might have happened, could have been a contributing factor to a sense of unease about our town.
The young thugs did nothing more than take his wallet, but they must have been surprised by the level of interest sparked by their thoroughly pedestrian act of street crime.
They got caught up in the moment, and were actually busted and punished, which is uncommon. Figure the chances of ripping off a Justice of the Supreme Court.
Considering all the odds, and all the possibilities, it should have been enough to make someone stay home that day.
Copyright 2009 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com