Endless COVID

We live in a country, folks, where reality is being debated, right, And the question that I'm asking friends and colleagues is this, can reality exist if fifty percent of people have created their own is there actually a founding and a basis right, a commonality? Because you see, in reality, we have to agree on certain principles, right, on certain ideas, which is that gravity exists, right, that you know you should stop at stop signs, that there are certain laws that dictate

the reality that we exist in. We cannot fly, so you should not try and jump off of a building, right that you should not ride a bicycle into you know, into a house. Like there were just certain things that based in reality, the reality that we all agree upon. But here's the thing. We no longer agree upon any fucking thing, not anything whatsoever. And you know, there was a time when I believed in strong debate. I used

to love the show Crossfire back in the day. You'll remember that, where you would have people from opposite sides and you would put out a theme or you'd put out an issue, and then they would hack it out and the audience right would be the better for it, until, of course, like everything else, they just descended into fuckery. But here's where we are. On Monday, Memorial Herman Hospital in Houston closed three ars down, three ers. They've closed.

And let me tell you what they've said in the announcement that was made due to the continued COVID nineteen surge and the strain on the hospital system's operation, it was closing three of its twenty four hour emergency rooms. I want you to think about that for a minute. A hospital has made an announcement in a developed country, in these United States, to say that they are closing their fucking doors to three of their twenty four hour

emergency rooms because they are overwhelmed and at capacity. Right, and apparently at capacity by a fucking hoax, by something. We've all made it up in our heads that apparently over six hundred thousand Americans have died in this country by something given to them by Peter Pan. Evidently it's

all just in our fucking heads. Hospitals are crumbling all across this country, and yet fifty percent of the population wants to tell me that I should put a fucking spoon on my arm where the vaccination shot went in, and if it sticks, that means that my DNA has been altered. And people are actually believing this fuck shit. You know, when I saw the report, which was about a week or so ago, of the young girl, and

I want us to remember her name. I want us to know her name right, eighth grader in Mississippi, And this is what the report says. Here, a sweet Mississippi town is in mourning the death of one of its sweetest students. A little over a thousand people called Raleigh, a place nestled in Smith County, Mississippi, home where a magnolia drive runs through the heart of downtown and a road is dotted with pastel colored storefronts and red brick

government buildings. For half a mile. It's a sleepy place. And now this sleepy little quintessential apparently American town is in a collective state of grief over a thirteen year old girl named Michaela Robinson who died of COVID. Here's the thing, folks, and this is what is getting to me.

How many Michaela's are there going to be? How many children across this country are going to die in the weeks because of the many executioners that we have at the helm of Red states across this country, death santis de satan, you know, choose your poison, abbot, and others. I just named the top two because this is who the rest of Red state governors are taking their cues from.

Mikaela went back to school as every other eighth grader in her town was going to go back to school, and she, along with eight other children, ended up in the ICU of Children's of Mississippi, the Children's Hospital. She died on August fourteenth. And the thing here in this story, folks, is that we always have Republicans that want to feed us this line of absolute bullshit about the children, And

what about the children? The children can't see two people of the same sex get married, because what about the children? The children can't go to the bathroom at the bathroom is gender neutral, because you know, what about the children? We need to put parental advisories on everything, because what about the children? But when it comes to actually changing and shaping and making sure that children are safe, right, and changing policy in order to keep children actually safe

from harm, we don't fucking do that. And nobody ever calls out Republicans and says, hey, what about the children. You have a classroom of first graders that get mowed down by an AR fifteen in Sandy Hook, and you tell us not to politicize. Now, the same fraction of QAnon fus right who believe that the vaccine is changing human DNA are the same people that believe that Sandy

Hook was all made up. That apparently the parents who lost their six and seventy year old children and had to bury them right, somehow they just made it up for attention. Say that the kids who watched their best friends die in front of them in Parkland, somehow they made that shit up too. They're just a bunch of actors. I talked about this a couple of weeks ago, that one of the Parkland students. His own father somehow now because of QAnon, believes that he was some type of

actor involved in the Parkland shooting. The man was in the house when he got the call that the school was locked down because there was a mass shooting. If this is where we have arrived in our society, we're instead of creating policy, instead of doing something to protect our children, we instead sell them bulletproof backpacks that instead of using a piece of fucking cloth that could keep your child from death from long term COVID, who has any idea what the fuck that will actually look like

in a body that's still developing. Instead of doing that, we have anti mask mandates rolled out in all of these states, including Mississippi where MICHAELA died. What about the children? Coming up next? Friends, is my conversation with our in house doctor, doctor Jonathan Metzel to talk to us about

the latest with COVID, folks. I am so excited to be back and in conversation with our in house doctor, doctor Jonathan Metzel, who is now back on location in Tennessee with his university, going to be teaching in person two hundred some odd students. Jonathan You've been in Tennessee for how long now? And what are you what are you seeing? As the differences between how New York and Connecticut were you also were throughout this time. We're hand

are handling COVID versus what you're seeing in Tennessee. I mean, I've been here, I guess for a week, but in dog years, it feels like I've been here for ten years already. It's been a really long week. It's great to talk to you. Hello, everybody. I would say in I've had this really weird thing right where for the past year I've been living on the East Coast, and

I mean certainly everywhere. It's not like you're going to escape it, but in general in New York, for example, I mean, certainly some people do what some people don't, but there's a general playing by a particular set of rules. You know, you go somewhere, people are in general wearing a mask. You can pretty much people you're going to interact with have been vaccinated. And now I started triple masking yesterday because it's just odd. Well it's more just

that like like are you breathing? Like do you have an oxygen techs? I had to go to the airport and take up light on Southwest Airlines, and so I just thought, man, I'm like swimming and I don't know if it's COVID or whatever something right now, So I figured I would rather be safe than sorry. But it's just it's interesting that like your everyday interactions are just you just you can't assume that people are playing by that same set of rules. I mean, I've been the

only mask person in multiple indoor settings. Certainly there are people here who are scared out of their minds. There are people here who are worried about it, people who

want to do the right thing. But it's just interesting to be part of a framework where the bigger framework is out of public health framework, and so everywhere you go you can pretty much just I just take it for granted outside of my university that I'm I just assume I'm going to be the only mass person, and that's It's not always the case, but it's often the case, and so it just leads to a different kind of I mean, again, I'm coming from a health perspective, it's

much it's harder to relax. I mean, I feel like this for me, I would mu surether be in New York, where everybody's kind of playing by a set of rules that are linked to kind of communal safety. For me, that is more relaxing, even though we're faced with this

shitty situation which is there's virus. But here it's kind of like everybody's it just feels like everybody's for themselves, which I don't know, I don't I don't like it as much, you know, It's just it's hard when you know, when you say that, like so in New York that everyone is playing by the same set of you know, similarly, the same set of rules, meaning that we're all kind of focused on community safety and community wellness, and that

has been from the top down. Right, do you feel though that when you are the only mask person inside somewhere, like, are you receiving sneers or people looking at you because they're operating frankly on a set of community values as well. They're libertarian freedoms, right, and what it is that they perceive to be their autonomy, which is the ability to

harm folks. And so I'm just wondering how are you being perceived with your masking with you know, within the university, but also just going to the store picking up you know, whatever it is that you need. Yeah, even if you wanted to wear a mask, you're you're just out numbered here basically. And so it's kind of like it's just exhaustion really in a certain kind of way. I mean,

certainly there are some people give you bad looks. Some people are like, oh I A lot of people like probably tried to wear masks and then they just kind of tired of it and stuff like that. And so it's more like it's more that it's more a structural level exhaustion, if that makes any sense. In other words, like some people are worried about COVID, some people aren't. Some people want to do the right thing. Some people

are just wanting to get on with their lives. But because the bigger structure isn't giving clear public health guidelines, and if they did, people wouldn't follow them. I'll give you an example. I was in the Nashville airport, and even though there's a mask mandate in the airport, plenty of people were just walking around with their mask, just covering their chin nostril patriots because they were determined to

have their noses outside of their masks. Some people just had their masks around one ear, and other people were like scared o their minds and like me, they had like seventy five masks on and stuff like that. But it's just like you're in this bigger pool of people doing things kind of differently. And so I don't know, certainly I had the individual economy to wear seventy five masks.

That was my liberty and my freedom. But I I would rather be part of a I mean, I'd probably sound like some bleading socialist right now, but I'd rather be part of a place where like everybody's just kind of wearing a mask. I just find it moreally relaxing. I guess what I'm trying to say, and it's hard to articulate because I'm in the middle of it now, is it's just coming from it. I find it to be in a situation where everyone is just making up their own rules. Yeah, and you know where are where

Where is Tennessee right now? In terms of their icee you beds in terms of their infection right I'm certain that you're probably following that in the same way that we follow it here in New York, and so are they in I'm assuming that they are in similar positions as Florida and Texas and Mississippi and Alabama. What do their numbers look like right now? It's catastrophic. I mean, it's horrible. There was a piece in the New York Times about it this morning. Not just COVID. We had

a flash floods here the other day. Yeah, a lot of people got killed. So there's um, you know, climate issues and things like that. But again we've got it. We've got, like many southern states, a governor who's going around overturning mask mandates, and so there's a push and pull like and there's a nice piece in the New York Times about it this morning that people are really worried, and there are a lot of parents who are worried.

But the big issue is school is going back in I'm starting teaching again tomorrow, and so it just it just feels like every person's out there for themselves and there's no an anytime you try to create like a kind of okay, let's do public health, you've got somebody like the horrible governor here, see who comes and overturns it. And so it's weird because on one hand, it's like, you know, states rights or individual liberty or something like that.

But every time a school tries to say, Okay, look we're going to we're going to legislate safety for our community, the governor comes in and says, you can't. You can't mandate masks in your schools. You've probably seen some videos of the people you know shouting down school board members and doctors are now getting getting attacked on social media,

and so it's not a good situation. I mean, again, people have their individual lived there are times where you need communal public health, and so I'm trying to get the lay of the land. It's been a week here, but I will say that I feel like this week has been a very long week. I mean, I'm I'm still kicking right here as we proceed, and I feel you and the viewers in on what things are like

in the South. It's just really again, everybody you see is not some crazy Twitter person, but just the everyday interaction. You just can't assume the same kind of safety. And of course this is all happening in the context of a bigger conversation where COVID is getting much worse and it's going to last now much longer, and vaccine hesitancy is really really going to prolong this narrative, so it just feels tiring right now, to be honest. That's it

for today's Woke, a f daily podcast. To hear more from today's show, including my full interview with doctor Jonathan Metzel, support me on Patreon at patreon dot com slash woke F Power to the people and to all the people. Power, get woke and stay woke as fuck.