When Life Hands You Lysol

I have nothing to say today. Well, that might not be exactly true, but it's close enough. 

How can one compete with ingesting disinfectant and shoving a UV light up the butt? You can't.

But I did have an interesting exchange with a childhood friend about this week's stupidity highlight. I'm not certain where her quote originated, but I'm using it anyway without attribution.

ER wrote:  I never heard an argument quite like this before. A somewhat unique reaction to the travesty in the White House. I still hate him with every fiber of my being. Here goes:

“Great summary of the lysol [sic] issue:

Look, he did not say we should inject ourselves with disinfectant. Watch the video. He wondered aloud why, if disinfectant kills the virus outside of the body, doctors can’t come up with a way for it to do so inside the body, the way a child wonders about things. The travesty here is not what he said, but why he is talking at all. Why is he wondering anything aloud? Why is he even there? Now he says he was being sarcastic, but that’s not possible and even if it were, why would that be okay? Why would being sarcastic ever be okay in this situation? He was being genuine, maybe a rare genuine moment for him, just genuinely ignorant and curious. If the virus is mean, why can’t we just tell it we don’t like it and then it will go away? So the issue we should be upset about isn’t that he said we should shoot up Lysol. He didn’t. The issue to be upset about is what we’ve been upset about since 2016. Why is it okay for an obviously ignorant person to be in a position to vocalize his curiosity to the world?”

The WP relied:  I understand what you are saying and went through similar gyrations trying to make sense of it. But here's the bottom line: this is not unlike what happened with hydroxychloroquine. He doesn't listen to what is said and he certainly does not think before he talks. So had it not blown up in his face as quickly as it did, within 24 hours he would be boasting about how doctors think he's a genius for coming up with a cure. How do we draw this conclusion? Within hours of his statement, medical facilities were flooded with calls asking how to ingest or inject disinfectant. He was speaking directly to his followers.

What we didn't know when Feckless Leader was proposing Dr. Mengele-like cures was that this was not original thought. Shortly after that memorable stroll down wacko-thinking, The Guardian published an article about a guy name Mark Grenon who had written to Feckless about chlorine dioxide

 – a powerful bleach used in industrial processes such as textile manufacturing that can have fatal side-effects when drunk – is “a wonderful detox that can kill 99% of the pathogens in the body”. He added that it “can rid the body of Covid-19”.

Well, at least now we're sure it wasn't some sort of extrapolation from a peer review journal of medicine or even Ripley's Believe It Or Not. Nope. Just another dose of snake-oil. Were you expecting something else?

Rest assured, his loyal minions were looking to try this new cure. Apparently, more than a a few people called poison control. I'm waiting for the numbers on admissions to hospital for disinfectant ingestion to become public. Of course, the talking orange bears no responsibility for any of this since he was being sarcastic. 

Sure he was. As Ziggy would say: evolution in action.

Well, one good thing may have come out of this: Feckless claims he's shutting down the daily bullshit. For that alone. we should be thankful. For the little things.

But where does that leave We, the People? 

Fintan O'Toole of the Irish Times was rather blunt:

Over more than two centuries, the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger. But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the US until now: pity.

Sitting in my study, I wonder if the quarantine will ever really end. I wonder about what changes to society are about to become permanent. And I wonder about how this is going to change life for the grandkids. Talking to Little Miss today, I asked her what was the hardest part about the quarantine. A 5-year old who understands corona and quarantine is a scary thing, but she does and she's given it a lot of thought. "Talking to my friends," she said with great conviction. "I miss being together and hugging." Five-year olds hug a lot. Hugging is a good thing and I don't want that to change for her and her friends.

Lots of people aren't getting hugs right now. Lots of people need them. Lots of people need to know their lives are not going down the drain. Lots of people are unable to feel secure or safe. Lots of people are in real danger of losing everything, losing their grip, or just losing their faith.

We, the People, stand at a precipice. Who we are as a nation, as a people, is about to be determined. By us. By every single one of us. It's time to set politics aside for a moment to look more closely at who we are now and who we want to be. There is that grave possibility that the high road we claim to want will not be chosen, and the nation will go the way of Kentucky. Are we prepared to deal with that reality?

The Wifely Person's Tip o'the Week

Don't drink or inject disinfectants of any kind.

There. I said it.