The human face

Long, long ago, months that seem like years ago now, the Blob settled on a name for the pandemic that has ravaged our nation for most of 2020.

The Bastard Plague. That's what I call it.

In hindsight this might have sounded like the Blob was trying to trivialize it, as our Our Only Available Outgoing President and so many other alleged national "leaders" have. This was never intended to be the case. The Blob calls it the Bastard Plague because of a commitment to accuracy. It's a Plague, and it is one righteous Bastard.

No one knows this better than Karl-Anthony Townes of the Minnesota Timberwolves.

On a Zoom media availability yesterday he painfully described what hell on Earth looks like, because he's been on an unwitting tour. Seven family members, he said, have died of COVID-19 or complications from it this year. The Bastard Plague killed his mother in April; it killed an uncle just the other day.

You want a human face for what irresponsibility, straight-up deception and fringe-wacko blathering about "freedom" have cost America this year, Townes will serve quite well.

That's important, because as the numbers continue to spiral they also numb us. Yesterday there were a record 216,548 new cases documented in the United States. The Plague's total death toll is now nearing 300,000. And every one of those 300,000 had a name, a face, husbands or wives or sons or daughters or any number of others who loved them.

And yet there are still state governors out there -- Ron DeSantis of Florida, Kristi Noem of South Dakota and Kim Reynolds of Iowa, come on down! -- who refuse to admit a public health crisis is actually a public health crisis, and to take appropriate measures to address it.

There are still rabid anti-maskers who say it's their inalienable right to assemble however and wherever they want, and who hurl "tyrant" at any public official who dares to put in place emergency measures to deal with the aforementioned public health crisis. 

And there are still ninnies out there who quibble over the Plague's death toll, splitting hairs over whether or not someone died of COVID-19 or simply with COVID-19. As if that makes a farthing's difference. If you died with the Plague, you died of it. Because whatever pre-existing condition you had would likely not have killed you at this particular time without the Plague to push you over the edge.

In any case, the imminent vaccine, and a President-elect who actually recognizes a public health crisis for what it is, cannot arrive too soon. They're the only things that can inoculate us from the idiots in our midst.

One of them, a Fort Wayne sports bar owner, got his place shut down by the board of health the other day. The Blob will not identify either the owner or the establishment, but when word came down that his place had been shuttered, a lot of folks in these parts nodded and said "Of course." That's because too many anecdotes were out there about the owner's militantly cavalier anti-mask stance. He was notorious for it.

And all of this happening against the backdrop of Indiana, and Allen County in particular, becoming one of the worst Plague hotspots in the nation, with case levels exploding and the availability of hospital beds dwindling by the day.

Now comes Karl-Anthony Townes to remind us that in every one of those hospital beds is a human being who loves and is loved. To remind us that the Bastard Plague is not a political hobby horse or a rallying point for kooks who mistake licentiousness for freedom, but merely a filthy serial killer using humanity for fuel.

God help us if we can't see that.