The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

 

For those of you waiting patiently for life to go back to the way it was pre-COVID, I have some bad news for you.  It’s not.  Sure, we’re inching back.  Facemasks are not required everywhere.  People are drifting back into their offices.  Large gatherings like concerts are happening again.   But Europe and Australia are still imposing brutal restrictions and the specter of the Delta Variance is being held over our heads like the Sword of Damocles.  COVID ignited or uncovered other currents and, in my view, life will never quite be the same again.  It remains to be seen exactly how all this will play out, but our society has been changed permanently, and most of the effects are not positive.   Still, there are some changes that will turn out to be beneficial, although they will be vastly outweighed by the deleterious outcomes that will occur as a consequence of COVID and the drive for Wokeness.  Over the next three posts, I will outline what I think are the good, the bad and the ugly that will be permanent changes to our lives.

The Good

At first, I was disillusioned by the apparent suicide attempt by pro sports, beginning with Colin Kaepernick.  Why would a sport seem to go out of its way to offend a large part of its fan base?  It is all the more perplexing because all professional sports is, essentially, is brand management and the anti-American and anti-patriotic symbols and gestures seemed to tarnish to brand.  Yet, the NFL, NBA and MLB seemed quite willing to absorb a huge dent in their viewership to prove sufficient Wokeness.

Except for the NHL, UFC and PGA, major pro sports seem to be outdoing themselves to demonstrate their commitment to Wokeness, rather than their fan base.

The NBA went all out in its BLM messaging last year and showed more fealty to the Chinese Communist Party than  to ordinary Americans.  The NFL announced that it will play the Black National Anthem before games.   MLB moved its All-Star game out of Atlanta and changed the name of the Cleveland Indians to the bland Guardians.

All three leagues are seeing a bleed off in ratings with the NBA suffering the biggest loss.

This is all good in the long run.

Because of the anti-trust exemptions granted these leagues, the salaries of these Woke players have gone into the stratosphere.   In contrast, the retired pro athletes that I had gotten to know – Bob Asher and George Seals of the Bears, Cliff Koroll, Grant Mulvey and Reggie Fleming of the Blackhawks all played for modest salaries and had to get real jobs after their playing careers ended.

I hope the downward trend in ratings continues.

I, for one, have turned my attention to other activities such as hiking, chess, and live music.

Who needs to watch LeBron shoot free throws at the end of a basketball game?  Why watch 300 pound linemen give each other CTE?  Or watch an interminably dull baseball game with your team 8 games out in July?

Our Olympic team was even worse.  After tripping over themselves to show how much contempt they have for the nation they supposedly represent, the women’s soccer team got pasted by Sweden 3-0 and the men’s basketball team got horsewhipped by….France.  I guess this is what global “equity” is all about.

Why do I think this is good?  Because we have become a nation of spectators, rather than doers.  We have turned athletes into members of the elite, as distant from us as the political elite, and every bit as contemptuous and disdainful of the rest of us. 

The other good development is working remotely.  The progressives have made urban living unlivable.   There was always a bit of an implicit deal—you would put up with the traffic and congestion, or being herded into commuter trains like cattle.  But the city offered a robust cultural life—restaurants, music, theater and such.  But now most cities are dangerous places since the defund police movement.  My own Chicago has 50-100 shootings a weekend, carjackings and robberies galore.  Downtown looks like a scene out of The Walking Dead.   So the implicit deal is dead.  The cultural benefits of the city are no longer available as a practical matter.  

Working remotely means you can minimize your time in the city, do away with the grinding commute and have more time for yourself and your family.  We have learned how to conference via Zoom and close transactions via Docusign.

I believe this trend will continue and that we can start drifting back to small town and rural life without too much difficulty and that is a good thing for families and communities.

Finally, another positive development is Podcasts.  While Mollie Hemmingway is undoubtedly correct—that the mainstream media has been irredeemably corrupted and social media is divisive and tyrannical (more on this later), podcasting has emerged as a wonderful and engaging development that enables lengthier, more thoughtful and nuanced discussions about complex ideas than merely a 180 character tweet. The recent interview of Bari Weiss by Jordan Peterson on his podcast  ran about 2 hours and the New Discourses podcasts by James Lindsay can run nearly as long.  Podcasting is a great vehicle with which to explore ideas more fully and (assuming deplatforming doesn’t occur) are a welcome development in an era starved for civil discourse.

Despite all the social and political turmoil, there have been some very positive developments since the onset of COVID19.  That is the good.  My next post will deal with The Bad and The Ugly.

Women and Children First

 Like most sane Americans, at this 245^th birthday, I worry a lot about the state of the union now.  A substantial minority has decided to displace Independence Day with Juneteenth (and don’t disingenuously tell me it’s not meant to be a displacement) and bump off 1776 and put 1619 in its stead.  Faux hyphenated historian Nikole Hannah-Jones was awarded tenure at UNC just for that work of revisionist and false narrative.

But the pathology that most concerns me is the obliteration of our society’s longstanding protections for women and children.   “Women and children first” was the cry on the Titanic and, ironically, is the name of the uber progressive bookstore in Chicago.   Sadly, the progressive movement has steamrolled those protections.  The gender-disoriented now come first.

With women, permitting biological males to compete with them in sports is simply absurd.  There are perhaps 300 high school boys that would eclipse Florence Griffith Joyner’s world record.  And now the Olympics are going to permit a biological male to compete with women in weightlifting.  In New Jersey, the family of a high school girl is suing the state because two athletes that were male just last year defeated her in her sprint event.  Girls and women fought hard under Title IX to have athletic opportunities and now they are being stripped away.

The Woke gender movement not only is destroying athletic opportunities, it’s flat out dangerous.  In athletics, the disparity in speed, strength and muscle mass in sports where there is contact will mean a greater likelihood of injury.    In other contexts, the risks are even greater.  In California, biological men can self-identify as women and get placed in women’s prisons.  A society that would put these vulnerable and already at-risk women at greater risk of sexual assault is one that is on the road to pathological breakdown.   The push to allow biological men in women’s restrooms is likewise wrong-headed and dangerous.   As a society, we have always offered special protections around womens’ privacy issues.  In addition, a restroom is an enclosed space in which an assault on a lone women is easier to perpetrate.   For adolescent girls that are self-conscious about their bodies anyway, permitting boys in their locker rooms and bathrooms is permitting a minority to tyrannize the majority.

With children, things are even worse.

With COVID19, the government is now pushing vaccination for children and adolescents despite the absence of any long term studies about its effects.  Bret Weinsten and Heather Heying have been lone voices raising alarm about this.  COVID19 carries very little risk for young people and the incidents of myocarditis that have popped up are enough to put the brakes on for young people.  We should not be exposing young people to unknown risks to protect old people.   In a healthy society, older people take risks so young people don’t have to.

Similarly, in Illinois, and many other places, kids lost an entire year of in person school, mostly due to stubborn teachers’ unions that adamantly refused to go back to work, even as COVID19 receded.  Many of these students will never make up the lost year.  In Illinois, it was even worse.   Governor Pritzker shut down high school sports in the fall, even though all adjacent states played a full season with no outbreaks.  Most obscenely, I saw soccer and lacrosse teams out practicing while fully masked.  These were the healthiest, lowest risk people in the population pool, yet were sentenced to be deprived of a full education, socialization and, in the case of athletes, entire seasons of play with no science behind it whatsoever.

We have made a policy choice to push risks on to young people and deprive young people of intellectual, emotional and physical development to protect older people.  That’s immoral, wrong, and a sign of a society in decline.  But it’s even worse.  Since February 2020, the national debt has increased by nearly $5 trillion.  Yes, government wonks all have rationales behind the gargantuan increase--- “stimulus” and all that.  But the fact remains that the economic slowdown was caused by deliberate government action which many believe was completely unnecessary.   And this debt burden will need to be borne by guess who? Young people.   It is a complete inversion of the American dream.  We work to secure a better future for the next generation.  Our policymakers have reversed it all.  We are stealing from them for current consumption.

The most egregious example of the failure to protect women was the breakdown at Michigan State that allowed the monster Larry Nasser to abuse so many women athletes.  Now we learn that the F.B.I. failed to alert law enforcement or take action against Nasser, thereby enabling him to continue to sexually abuse these girls.

So the university AND the F.B.I. both failed to protect them—two large bureaucracies whose primary mission is nurturing and protecting.   After reading the inspector general’s report, I wanted to scream out loud, “YOU HAD ONE JOB.”   This was done under the sanctimonious Jim Comey, whose book carries the obscenely title “A Higher Loyalty” and who now teaches a course in ethical leadership at William and Mary.   He should have been banished and shamed for allowing the catastrophe at Michigan State under his aegis.

Our society is tearing down basic protections for women and children.   Civilized societies put them first. 

Outdoor Spaces

 

It was quite a revealing juxtaposition of events that occurred over the past week.  I visited upon the website of the Chicago Botanic Garden to check on their summer hours and happened upon the institution’s statement “Our commitment to racial justice and equity,” which I found a bit odd for a garden.

The statement included the following sentences:

In 2020, the Black Lives Matter movement catalyzed a process of self-examination and learning at the Garden.   We recognize that people of color often feel unwelcome in gardens, forest preserves, and parks, a direct result of historical oppression and violence in outdoor spaces.

I have questions and some observations about this remarkable assertion.

The statement chose to recognize BLM in all caps.  I wonder if it occurred to them that one of its founders, Patrice Cullors, leveraged her position to build a nice little real estate portfolio and that BLM while raising millions has, to my knowledge, while provided absolutely zero support for the expansion of outdoor spaces and outdoor programs for urban black youths.  Go figure. 

I’m not sure how the Garden came to the conclusion that people of color feel unwelcome in gardens, forest, preserves, and parks.  Did they do a survey?  How do they know this?  Every time I have visited the Chicago Botanic Garden, I have observed quite a panoply of people “of color” and not “of color” – whites,  African Americans, Indians (are they “of color”?), Asians, Middle Easterners both in hijabs and kippas, and actual Africans.  Once last summer, I saw a small trio of Africans playing African music with a group gathered around them, enjoying a balmy summer evening.  I saw no hint that any of them felt unwelcome.

There is tremendous irony in the last phrase of this absurd statement by the Chicago Botanic Garden.  In Chicago last 4^th of July weekend, nearly 100 people were shot, 17 were killed, 8 of them children.  Many of these incidents of violence are taking place in parks and outdoor spaces.  In my own old neighborhood, a 13 year old was shot in the head riding his bike on a Sunday morning.  Shootings routinely take place in and around Washington Park and Garfield Park. 

The statement by the Chicago Botanic Garden echoes the purported complicity in the normalization of violence against people of color by literature in the original faculty statement by the English Department at the University of Chicago. 

So, universities and gardens are unsafe places for people of color.

The hard truth that no one wants to acknowledge is that the violence of which these institutions decry is perpetrated by people of color, with people of color most often being the victims.  At the University of Chicago, two students have been violently killed… by people of color.  Last weekend, young Max Solomon was shot and killed on the “L” on his way to his summer internship.   The Woke organizations are beating their breasts about historical violence, yet ignore the violence that is going on each and every weekend…. and won’t discuss the perpetrators, and, in an era where even tulip bulbs and ferns are racialized, adeptly sidestep talking about their race.

As if to put an exclamation mark on things, a Chicago police officer and 2 ATF agents were shot directly in front of a police station on the South Side. 

Overlayed on this bloody weekend was the visit of our addled president, Joe Biden, to Illinois.  Biden, famously stated, “If you don’t vote for me, you ain’t black” and “[Republicans] want to put y’all back in chains.”  Yet, visiting Illinois a few days after the black community suffered one of the bloodiest weekends in Chicago history, Biden stayed far enough away from the South and West sides of the city that radiation from a nuclear blast wouldn’t reach him.  He assiduously avoided any contact with any black person that didn’t hold political office.

As more institutions like the Chicago Botanic Garden and the American Writers Museum go Woke, they, like their president, remain a safe distance from the actual, relentless violence that is occurring every week in Chicago.