Dislocation, envisioned

The prophet is never the guy you invite to parties. No one really wants to hear him harsh the mellow by prattling on, over drinks and hors d'oeuvres, about how the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are coming, and so you'd best lay in a stock of booze and toilet paper.

So you can understand why a lot of folks probably think ESPN college football analyst Kirk Herbstreit is a big poopyhead right now.

It's because Herbstreit hauled off and said he'd be shocked if there were any NFL or college football seasons this fall, and then laid out the reasons why. Pro and college football, he said in so many words, are the literal antithesis of social distancing. Not only do you have thousands of people crammed cheek-by-germ in the stands, you have thousands of them hanging out together in the parking lots, football being the unique American social event it is.

Absent the development of a COVID-19 vaccine, Herbie says, NFL teams and universities simply aren't going to want to assume liability if players or fans get sick after games.

He has a point. I just think he's getting a bit ahead of developments here.

On the other hand, I also think this: I don't really know.

I don't really know because none of us really know what next fall is going to look like, in the new reality of COVID-19. Will the curve, as they say, flatten by then? Will the pandemic burn itself out, as most pandemics have before? Will it go away for awhile and then come back with a vengeance, as so many also have throughout history?

The bubonic plague that first reached Europe in the early 1300s kept recurring for centuries, remember. Ditto the 1918 flu pandemic that killed half-a-million Americans and hundreds of millions worldwide. It first surfaced in Kansas in the spring of 1918, subsided for awhile, then came back in a far more deadly form in the late summer and fall.

Hard to say right now if COVID-19 is going to do that, or if it will be anything remotely comparable. Hard to say anything at this point, especially given that the United States is still in the early stages of this outbreak and already has exceeded every other country in the world in confirmed cases. And that with testing which remains far less available than in all those other countries.

Which  is why Herbstreit can't simply be dismissed as a Chicken Little running in circles dodging pieces of sky. Or why we can't say when the baseball season will begin, or if it does. Or if moving the Indianapolis 500 to the third week of August is just delaying its inevitable cancellation.

Right now, on March 28, we can't say anything. Especially in a nation where kids are holding coronavirus parties and a significant portion of the population still believes the whole thing is a hoax pumped up by the Evil Media to make our Glorious Leader look bad.

One of those people, an itinerant pastor and musician in Virginia, just died from that hoax.

Kirk Herbstreit doesn't sound so crazy, next to that. Not so crazy at all.