Coronavirus Ramblings
Kent Anthony Mayeux
Apr 22, 2020·6 min readMy frequent bouts of melancholy locked between these four walls because of the pandemic allow my mind to relieve its boredom with thoughts one would usually never bring to fruition. Thoughts are things too and deserve our attention once and a while. If we paid more attention to our emotions (the area of our soul where thoughts derive), one might discover that problems, both mentally, physically and financially, are much more easily recognizable and eventually solvable than the burdens continually heaped upon ourselves while running around in this frantic work-a-day world. Coronavirus provides the time to dwell on these figments of our imagination, thoughts, thoughts of love and hate, thoughts of good and evil and thoughts of freedom and confinement. Thoughts materialize from facts, i.e., perceived reality, whether that reality is subjective or objective. Let us examine a few random facts for our reading pleasure, some real and quantifiable and some idiosyncratic and one-sided.
Philosophy was not my favorite class in college. The professor always started the semester from some obscure point within the lineal history of the development of the science of philosophy. The hundreds of years of philosophical thought were hidden from view and the class was lost within a huge dark forest the entire semester on a trail from which we were dropped. Many call philosophy a science but this branch of metaphysical though is more theory than mathematical certainty. In any event I was always more confused about my thoughts of “being” and “from which I came” at the end of the semester than the start. By the time the semester had ended, I was dumbfounded. Philosophy, I imagined, would not be a good major in college and there began my decline in thoughts.
Has anyone ever noticed the hair length of these politicians on TV during the coronavirus? I was recently tempted to get my wife to cut my hair but I remembered how I treasured my long locks to my shoulders in high school. The thought of barbers, back then, frightened me. By my twenties the length gradually grew shorter but with much disdain and trepidation. The older I got the more closely I conformed to societal norms and the barber was eventually trimming my hair above my ears. Now I only get to think about the increasing size of my bald spot and my receding hairline. Oh, how I long for the days of my youth, but the thoughts of those yearnings are for another day. We need to open salons and barbershops. One never appreciates the value of salons until your hair length is unmanageable and there is no one to offer a haircut.
Here is an intriguing thought, the death toll of the coronavirus in China. Trump, during his daily MAGA rally on April 18, 2020, cast doubt on official Chinese figures showing that China has suffered just 0.33 deaths per 100,000 people as a result of the coronavirus. “The number’s impossible,” he said. “It’s an impossible number to hit.” The United States, according to a chart displayed at the briefing, has 11.24 deaths per 100,000 people while France has 27.92 and Spain has 42.81 deaths per 100,000 people. Can China, the epicenter of the Wuhan virus with 1.8 billion people in the country, suffer a death rate of .33 per 100,000 people? That math equals to one person dead out of a group of every 300,000 people. The Chinese coronavirus numbers seem contrived and subjectively manipulated. Could it be possible that China manufactured the virus, and, before it was released, also manufactured a vaccination to keep its death toll low? What an evil thought.
How about this obscure thought. Don’t we always like to think that people are spying on us? Well not really. Such subjective thoughts might classify oneself as cuckoo. Nevertheless, I ponder these thoughts often. We are all familiar with the thought police- Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Google (FAAMG). They track our every move and listen and record all of our conversations. These five companies track every step we take and place we visit. All of this gleaned information is stored in huge databases (the Cloud). They store our locations, our phone calls, our text messages, our email messages, our internet browsing histories, our instant messages, our pictures and recordings, our vacations, our shopping trends, our business travel and even the documents we create. On top of that, they create Apps that access this information and collect information that is even more detailed. At least these companies are “American” companies. In this age of information and disinformation, China and Russia lead the way in influence peddling and attempts at control of our thoughts. What evil thoughts when faced with such a stark reality.
Here is a thought about the internet. Has Information dissemination reached its peak? Unfortunately, for the baby boomer generation, it has only just begun. Tech is turning to 5G. Information will stream wirelessly at a much larger quantity and speed. Millennials and Gen X, Y and Z will experience an immediate future that took 100 years for the boomers to reach. What is next? AI will bring self-driving cars and planes, personal passenger drones, robots to wait on us and clean the house, Wi-Fi TVs connected to the net, phones and laptops connected by texts and more work from home. Thoughts, facts and information have become immediate. Information dissemination is good. But does it come with a cost? Tech has become a drug for our children and they will not live without it. We cannot even imagine what the 6th and 7th generations of wireless communication technology will bring. The Jetsons would be envious. “I’m home! What’s for dinner, honey?” Be grateful for the homes we do have to wait out this horrible invisible enemy. Stay-at-home orders have brought self-reflection and closeness of families and thoughts of love despite the internet.
How about a thought on economics? The coronavirus brought to the fore economic lessons I learned in college. China has gobbled up our entire manufacturing base, even Smithfield Foods, one of the largest meat packing plants in the USA. Moreover, China is closing the plants in the USA because of the coronavirus. Can you think of what China could have done to us if Trump was not as diligent? China stole all of our hi-tech knowledge, China makes all of our medicines and China controls our food supply. China controls just about every aspect of our life and we were completely unaware of the facts before the coronavirus. If our country had drifted into open insurrection and rebellion among our own citizens within our borders because of the Wuhan virus, we may have all been speaking Chinese within the next two years. The economic lesson we must learn from this disaster is that globalism is not the answer. Made in the USA must become more than a slogan but an economic reality. Buy American; avoid made in China, grown in China, raised in China or caught in China. Economic independence may be the difference between freedom and confinement.
A final thought. AOC and other alt left progressives are running around the country and celebrating the closure of businesses due to coronavirus, especially businesses in the oil and gas industry. I can never understand the hatred for United States corporations and small businesses by the left. These progressives deride “corporate greed” and “corporate welfare” as something to despise. I cannot understand the thinking of a liberal. Businesses and corporations provide millions of jobs to Americans. These jobs in turn allow Americans to provide a roof over their head and put food on the table. Who else will provide this sustenance, big government? Communism, where everything is owned and controlled by the government and its dictator, foments hate. Our free economic system allows us to become self-sufficient. It allows us to open our own businesses or seek jobs. In turn, large and small businesses alleviate the need for government handouts. If these progressive “government employees” ever personally created a job, they would understand the importance of the nature of the business employer- employee dynamic. The coronavirus should provide an economic lesson to the progressives, especially the Paycheck Protection Program, but Progressives will always believe in big government, no matter the benefits of American business. Thoughts of going back to my job ring freedom in my mind.
Coronavirus is a thought I would rather forget.
WRITTEN BY
Kent Anthony Mayeux
Kent is a husband, father, grandfather, retired attorney, writer and aspiring apologist. He wrote five self published books and writes a blog.
Kent Anthony Mayeux
Apr 22, 2020·6 min readMy frequent bouts of melancholy locked between these four walls because of the pandemic allow my mind to relieve its boredom with thoughts one would usually never bring to fruition. Thoughts are things too and deserve our attention once and a while. If we paid more attention to our emotions (the area of our soul where thoughts derive), one might discover that problems, both mentally, physically and financially, are much more easily recognizable and eventually solvable than the burdens continually heaped upon ourselves while running around in this frantic work-a-day world. Coronavirus provides the time to dwell on these figments of our imagination, thoughts, thoughts of love and hate, thoughts of good and evil and thoughts of freedom and confinement. Thoughts materialize from facts, i.e., perceived reality, whether that reality is subjective or objective. Let us examine a few random facts for our reading pleasure, some real and quantifiable and some idiosyncratic and one-sided.
Philosophy was not my favorite class in college. The professor always started the semester from some obscure point within the lineal history of the development of the science of philosophy. The hundreds of years of philosophical thought were hidden from view and the class was lost within a huge dark forest the entire semester on a trail from which we were dropped. Many call philosophy a science but this branch of metaphysical though is more theory than mathematical certainty. In any event I was always more confused about my thoughts of “being” and “from which I came” at the end of the semester than the start. By the time the semester had ended, I was dumbfounded. Philosophy, I imagined, would not be a good major in college and there began my decline in thoughts.
Has anyone ever noticed the hair length of these politicians on TV during the coronavirus? I was recently tempted to get my wife to cut my hair but I remembered how I treasured my long locks to my shoulders in high school. The thought of barbers, back then, frightened me. By my twenties the length gradually grew shorter but with much disdain and trepidation. The older I got the more closely I conformed to societal norms and the barber was eventually trimming my hair above my ears. Now I only get to think about the increasing size of my bald spot and my receding hairline. Oh, how I long for the days of my youth, but the thoughts of those yearnings are for another day. We need to open salons and barbershops. One never appreciates the value of salons until your hair length is unmanageable and there is no one to offer a haircut.
Here is an intriguing thought, the death toll of the coronavirus in China. Trump, during his daily MAGA rally on April 18, 2020, cast doubt on official Chinese figures showing that China has suffered just 0.33 deaths per 100,000 people as a result of the coronavirus. “The number’s impossible,” he said. “It’s an impossible number to hit.” The United States, according to a chart displayed at the briefing, has 11.24 deaths per 100,000 people while France has 27.92 and Spain has 42.81 deaths per 100,000 people. Can China, the epicenter of the Wuhan virus with 1.8 billion people in the country, suffer a death rate of .33 per 100,000 people? That math equals to one person dead out of a group of every 300,000 people. The Chinese coronavirus numbers seem contrived and subjectively manipulated. Could it be possible that China manufactured the virus, and, before it was released, also manufactured a vaccination to keep its death toll low? What an evil thought.
How about this obscure thought. Don’t we always like to think that people are spying on us? Well not really. Such subjective thoughts might classify oneself as cuckoo. Nevertheless, I ponder these thoughts often. We are all familiar with the thought police- Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Google (FAAMG). They track our every move and listen and record all of our conversations. These five companies track every step we take and place we visit. All of this gleaned information is stored in huge databases (the Cloud). They store our locations, our phone calls, our text messages, our email messages, our internet browsing histories, our instant messages, our pictures and recordings, our vacations, our shopping trends, our business travel and even the documents we create. On top of that, they create Apps that access this information and collect information that is even more detailed. At least these companies are “American” companies. In this age of information and disinformation, China and Russia lead the way in influence peddling and attempts at control of our thoughts. What evil thoughts when faced with such a stark reality.
Here is a thought about the internet. Has Information dissemination reached its peak? Unfortunately, for the baby boomer generation, it has only just begun. Tech is turning to 5G. Information will stream wirelessly at a much larger quantity and speed. Millennials and Gen X, Y and Z will experience an immediate future that took 100 years for the boomers to reach. What is next? AI will bring self-driving cars and planes, personal passenger drones, robots to wait on us and clean the house, Wi-Fi TVs connected to the net, phones and laptops connected by texts and more work from home. Thoughts, facts and information have become immediate. Information dissemination is good. But does it come with a cost? Tech has become a drug for our children and they will not live without it. We cannot even imagine what the 6th and 7th generations of wireless communication technology will bring. The Jetsons would be envious. “I’m home! What’s for dinner, honey?” Be grateful for the homes we do have to wait out this horrible invisible enemy. Stay-at-home orders have brought self-reflection and closeness of families and thoughts of love despite the internet.
How about a thought on economics? The coronavirus brought to the fore economic lessons I learned in college. China has gobbled up our entire manufacturing base, even Smithfield Foods, one of the largest meat packing plants in the USA. Moreover, China is closing the plants in the USA because of the coronavirus. Can you think of what China could have done to us if Trump was not as diligent? China stole all of our hi-tech knowledge, China makes all of our medicines and China controls our food supply. China controls just about every aspect of our life and we were completely unaware of the facts before the coronavirus. If our country had drifted into open insurrection and rebellion among our own citizens within our borders because of the Wuhan virus, we may have all been speaking Chinese within the next two years. The economic lesson we must learn from this disaster is that globalism is not the answer. Made in the USA must become more than a slogan but an economic reality. Buy American; avoid made in China, grown in China, raised in China or caught in China. Economic independence may be the difference between freedom and confinement.
A final thought. AOC and other alt left progressives are running around the country and celebrating the closure of businesses due to coronavirus, especially businesses in the oil and gas industry. I can never understand the hatred for United States corporations and small businesses by the left. These progressives deride “corporate greed” and “corporate welfare” as something to despise. I cannot understand the thinking of a liberal. Businesses and corporations provide millions of jobs to Americans. These jobs in turn allow Americans to provide a roof over their head and put food on the table. Who else will provide this sustenance, big government? Communism, where everything is owned and controlled by the government and its dictator, foments hate. Our free economic system allows us to become self-sufficient. It allows us to open our own businesses or seek jobs. In turn, large and small businesses alleviate the need for government handouts. If these progressive “government employees” ever personally created a job, they would understand the importance of the nature of the business employer- employee dynamic. The coronavirus should provide an economic lesson to the progressives, especially the Paycheck Protection Program, but Progressives will always believe in big government, no matter the benefits of American business. Thoughts of going back to my job ring freedom in my mind.
Coronavirus is a thought I would rather forget.
WRITTEN BY
Kent Anthony Mayeux
Kent is a husband, father, grandfather, retired attorney, writer and aspiring apologist. He wrote five self published books and writes a blog.
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