(Old Style Medical Emergency).

Had a chat this morning with pals in Colorado and down on the Chesapeake. The former reported -15F, with a slow increase to maybe -5 later in the morning. Chesapeake reports rain and much “warmer” in the 30s, which is about where we are in Virginia’s gentle-climed Piedmont. The nice Lady in Red on the television says we will be talking about this flood of chill air that is sweeping east for years to come. That makes it all seem serious, and it is.

I wanted to be light and upbeat as we emerge from whatever happened in the last months of a historic year. Given the situation though, it seems we are expected to see parts of this collective history continue for quite a while. We have the national guard presence in DC which is expected to continue at least through the Fall. The school problem likewise seems to require a bunch of new construction that could last far longer than that. The benefits derived from them benefit our lawmakers, and the Teacher’s Unions who support most of them. Nothing like this would be approved without The Emergency, of course, and we have to take the Emergency for what it is.

There are some details, naturally. I saw a note that total deaths in America were a little less than average for all age groups under 65 through the end of last year. It was a little higher for those over sixty-five years of age. I was going to apply some mathematical analysis to what that means, but that brought a guffaw of laughter from the Editorial staff. The Experts are telling us that correct answers are racist this week. There is some gobblety-gook that supports that astonishing premise, something about “equity,” from what I can decipher. It is like all the other irrational things we are supposed to believe, based on expert advice, it is enough to keep us rolling at the farce.

The experts who advised us on masks are a perfect example. We were informed, first, that no masks were required because there weren’t enough of them. Then we were told to be masked, even while dining. With that said, we were then informed that double-masking might make us twice as safe, but that only lasted a couple days before single masks were sufficient protection until a couple days later we were told to double-down again. This is entertainment, and Science, at their finest.

If you are about to laugh, it is just a function of those cursed numbers. Here is the deal. The debate has become a matter of life and death. We are supposed to recognize this is a cause against death, and if you question it, you are some sort of macabre and malevolent moron. I am not advocating that approach. What I propose is that we are now at war with what used to be unpleasant but sadly normal. Inevitable, in fact. Older folks have less resistance to virulent disease. Sometimes their life ends that way, with sorrow and loss. But we appear to have forgotten that we all go. It is only a question of when. To declare what was normal an “emergency” is not new as a means of governance.

We have emergencies from time to time, and there is even law to specify what sort of Executive response is permitted to them. President Ford signed the National Emergencies Act (NEA) in 1976, which ended all the previous legislation to deal with emergencies and formalize them in the powers of emergency response allotted to the Chief Executive
The Act was an attempt to formalize a process that had emerged as a response to sudden developments outside the scope of the legislative process. It enabled the President to activate special powers during a crisis. As any rational law would do, it imposed certain procedural formalities on how such sweeping powers were utilized. The NEA did not come out of nowhere, or a good idea someone had during a workout in the House gym. The scope and number of existing laws were significant, and based on the number of emergencies we had experienced. There were 136 emergency powers defined by law, and they can be terminated with a joint Congressional resolution. There is more, of course, but you get the idea. Sometimes response to quickly evolving crisis needs swift central action. There also needs to be a means to terminate the emergency powers before anyone gets too comfortable with it. As of last March, 60 national emergencies had been declared, and half of them are still in effect. I have no information on the number of new emergencies that have been added with COVID.
That gets back to some of the accumulated law that applies to public health emergencies. Mindful of the then-current memory of the Spanish Flu epidemic, Franklin Roosevelt signed the Public Health Service Act in 1944. That law has had periodic rumblings all by itself, including the battle over human experimentation (the Stem Cell debate, among others) that we might have discussed as the Warp Speed initiative delivered vaccines in record time to be administered in record time to a very large population. In no way does the Socotra Decision Desk oppose such bold initiatives. It does seem that we could have at least talked about it as occurred, but it was an emergency.

Thankfully life is getting back to the new normal they will permit us to have. With all the emergencies confronting us, sometimes sequentially and sometimes simultaneously, I guess that is about as good as we are going to get.

Which leads to the problem with understanding and cognition. We seem comfortable in calling the cold wave what it is- the weather. It is not an emergency, per se, though of course it will require emergency response for the folks who lose power. We have always dealt with crazy manifestations of that, while we nod gravely and accept estimates of the climate in a hundred years time as matters of proven fact. We started this climate thing with warnings about the coming ice age forty years ago. It seems the time has come around again, almost like it was natural. This time we are calling modest “warming” an extent crisis and an emergency, which is why we are doing what we are doing. Experts assure us it is necessary. We were at risk from 136 emergencies, so a couple more shouldn’t overwhelm us, right? We have even been through this sort of thing before, and placed limits on the exercise of power.

That is what is new about this one. We have forgotten our history. Everything is new.

Copyright 2021 Vic Socotra
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