A routine Monday – Ripe wineberries – Supreme Court decision – Anti-abortion lobby – Asymptomatic coronavirus cases – Evening statistics
Mondays tend to signify beginning a new week for me, even during retirement. For one thing, the refuse collection in my neighborhood occurs on Mondays, which means that I must get up early enough to place the garbage containers, recycle bins, and lawn cuttings outside of the house before the trucks come by to pick them up. I prefer not to leave these outside overnight, especially under the current circumstances, when the wildlife has become considerably emboldened.
Other than that there is not much to record on a personal level, except for rambling through trails that run through the neighborhood and taking advantage of the fact that the now-ripe wineberries are plentiful. They are actually considered an invasive species, but their fruit is too appetizing to resist. They are less tart than raspberries, a trifle more tangy, and even more fragile; the only way to transport them is to put them loosely in bags. If one uses plastic containers they disintegrate in next to no time at all. Nor do they store well; if they are not eaten the day that they are picked then the only way to use them at all is in preserves. For these reasons one never finds them in the stores. The only way one can eat them is to gather them in the wild or to cultivate them in a garden.
My aunt has been rejoicing about the Supreme Court decision today that has ruled against the Louisiana law regulating abortion clinics – specifically, the one that requires that a physician who performs abortions must have admission privileges to a hospital within 30 miles of his office, which imposes significant limitations on a state with a substantial rural population. Indeed it is somewhat surprising how emotionally invested the religious right are in this issue. I am, admittedly, not an expert in these matters. But even as a mere male it seems apparent to me that an abortion is, shall we say, a somewhat invasive procedure, usually entailing a degree of pain and not without a certain amount of risk as well. I cannot believe that any woman undertakes such a step lightly. If the anti-abortion lobby were truly serious about realizing its goals, they would do well to try to reverse the Hollywoodian (or hollow-wooden) standard that glorifies exploitation of women. And if anyone disbelieves the claim that such a standard prevails in our country (and of course we are scarcely unique in this), I challenge him or her to go to any high school or college campus in the country, select a young male student at random, and say to him, “I understand that you’re quite the stud.” I guarantee that he will regard that remark as a compliment, not an insult.
There are indeed certain enclosed societies that make a conscious effort to discourage the notion that promiscuity is a quality to be admired, in men as well as in women. I will take, as an example, the one that I know of best from personal contact – that is, the Orthodox Jews. They have their skirt-chasers and would-be Casanovas like everyone else. But these are regarded as buffoons, triflers, people of no consequence socially. The result is that the majority of Orthodox Jewish women do not feel particularly flattered by their attentions and that the rate of seduction and unwanted pregnancy is therefore significantly lower than the national average.
So it is with the Amish; so it is with the fundamentalist Muslims. One reason that young women from relatively affluent and even liberal households are enticed into conversion to fundamentalist Islam – which does not, on the face of it, offer much scope for any woman – is that they are impressed by its claims to forestall the possibility of women being impregnated and then deserted, thereby having to cope with bearing a child and bringing it up without assistance, as is frequently the case in our society.
It is certainly a social evil to have a large number of women carrying prospective children whom they cannot possibly support on their own. If the anti-abortionists were sincere in their professed protective attitudes towards women, they would be concentrating their efforts on combating the social attitudes that bring such a situation about – the sort of humorous indulgence, for example, that is so frequently accorded to our Don Juans in real life. But they do not. They prefer to let the tail wag the dog. Instead of trying to forestall the predators, they focus on penalizing the victims.
Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the CDC, said that “Our best estimate right now is that for every case that’s reported, there actually are 10 other infections.” This statement highlights one of the issues of the coronavirus: the asymptomatic cases. No one really knows why the virus affects some cases severely, some fatally, and others not at all. Underlying factors certainly aggravate the ravages of the virus but that is not the entire story. Some perfectly healthy young people have contracted the disease, and some have succumbed to it, in increasing numbers. I simply have no idea from one day to the next whether I have the virus or not, even though I’ve not had any symptoms to date. Nor is it clear whether or not the asymptomatic cases can transmit the disease, but at this point the most prudent course is to assume that they can. That is one reason that my visits to my mother’s facility have been relatively brief and infrequent.
Today’s statistics as of 8:00 PM — # of cases worldwide: 10,401,162; # of deaths worldwide: 507,499; # of cases U.S.: 2,681,406 # of deaths U.S.: 128,774. Our country has seen an increase of over 44,000 new cases today. Florida accounts for over 5,000 of these, Texas for nearly 6,000, California for nearly 7,000. Virginia’s increase was relatively low and the number of daily new cases is declining, but it was still over 450 today. The death toll today for the country was 338, which represents a decline from earlier days. But it is unknown at this point whether the recent spate of new cases will reverse this trend.