People's Behavior and the Corona Virus

There are multiple news stories of people ignoring the advice--even the orders--of government officials and health authorities to "shelter in place" and avoid crowds, groups, etc.

I read that many people are going to church. If that's not a crowd, I don't know what is. I strongly suspect that they feel that, if they are good, faithful, believing church goers, God will protect them from any illness. My money is on the other side, that this behavior is spreading the virus. But then I freely admit that we've got radically differing worldviews going on here.

And then there are the people gathering on beaches and so forth--for example, students on their spring break in Florida. Police had to disperse these crowds and then officials closed the beaches. In this case we think of the fact that young people seem to feel they are invulnerable and often show poor judgment.

So I thought it was going to turn out to be young people involved, again, when I saw a story about police breaking up a party in New Jersey where the partygoers were packed into a 550-sq ft apartment. But no, in this case it was actually a 47-year-old man who was hosting the party. He called it a "corona party." I can only think of adjectives like stupid and foolish and defiance of advice (and government orders) such as you'd expect from 18 year olds.

Well, readers of my blog may have already divined that--based on life experience of almost more decades than I care to admit to--I have conceived a low opinion of the wisdom and rationality of the mass of my fellow human beings. In an age when the survival of humanity is threatened by climate change and destruction of animal species and of the environment in general, I find it difficult to side with the optimists.

Copyright (c) 2020

Skinny: A Memoir

When I was an adolescent I was very slender. When I had to register for the draft—I think that was age 18—the weight that got put on my draft card was 127 pounds--at a height of about 5'10".

Maybe I was very thin even before my adolescence, because I remember that as a child I didn't seem to want to eat, and my parents pretty much had to cajole me into eating—"Take a bite for Grandma" or one for Uncle Willy; "eat this Brussels sprout named Agamemnon" (yes, really).

One of my older female relatives called me a lange luksh—Yiddish for "long noodle." My grandmother once said that she only wished that she would live to see me gain weight (I don't think she did).

My high school Biology teacher predicted that I would never be heavy because, as he put it, I don't have the frame to hang fat on.

Well, right now—pushing the age of 70—I'm hardly obese but I'm not really slim, either. Depending on what figures are taken for my height and weight, my BMI (body-mass index) is right at the edge of the overweight zone. I have gained about 50 pounds in 50 years—maybe a better record than many, in this age of epidemic obesity, but certainly taking me far from the skinny category.

Still, I am small-boned, and I hope that, since people of a certain age seem to tend to be very thin, I may yet again be slim, even as I once was.

Copyright © 2011 by Richard Stein

Parents, Beware! . . .Lest Your Actions Backfire

Sometimes parents' actions, with respect to their children, backfire. And sometimes, I think, the parents deserve it.

When I was a kid, I think I can say that religion was more or less forced down my throat. I was made to go to Hebrew school (two hours a day, after regular public school, four days a week), even though I was terrified of my Hebrew school teachers which caused me stomach aches that landed me in the hospital. But attending Hebrew school had to be done, so that I could have a Bar Mitzvah. (I didn't want to have a Bar Mitzvah, but, in my parents' eyes, how could a boy not have a Bar Mitzvah?) Also, where religion was concerned, I felt I saw hypocrisy in my parents, that they were saying, Do as we say, not as we do.

So I later rejected the ancestral faith pretty completely. I absolutely don't observe it at all--although, to be completely honest, my parents' actions don't get all of the blame for that. But I think my parents richly deserve that outcome.

In another example, when I was a kid I was into photography (I still am). I would use my mother as a photographic subject. So, maybe as a birthday present, my mother gave me a book called How to Photograph Women.

After she gave me the book, my mother discovered that the book had pictures of naked women (I was an adolescent at the time, I believe). Well, one day when I was not around, Mother seized the book—and cut out all the pages with the nude photos.

I think that that's screamingly funny when you consider that I grew up to be gay. I mean, what were the photos supposed to have done to me, make me feel lust for women? Of course I can't say that not having those pictures made me gay; but in hindsight, maybe my mother might have wished that she could have fostered lust for naked women in me.

Copyright © 2010 by Richard Stein