GERMOPHOBIA, GYM CLASS SHOWERS AND THE SEEDS OF CORONAMANIA

Over the course of my life, I’ve read many books. I don’t say this boastfully; to the contrary, if you visited my house, randomly pulled down a book from the shelves and asked me what I remember from it, I might struggle to provide much detail. If so, much reading time might seem to have been wasted.

I tell myself that my recall is better than it would appear to be, given how I might underperform during the pop quiz I just posited. I think I do remember much from these books. But most of that knowledge is baked-in/recognition memory and can only be accessed from my mental archive when I begin to reread passages, or if an old book’s content pertains to something I’m currently experiencing or thinking about.

The same is true of conversations with others. I used to hitch-hike long distances. During those trips, many drivers, like books, presented a memorable story or idea. Same with things I’ve heard during bus, train or plane rides, shared walks, church sermons, coach pep talks, school lectures, museum displays or late-night diner sessions. These memories are packaged in disorganized, invisible excerpts, to be summoned when the context makes them relevant.

When I was in kindergarten, an older kid told me I had to endure twelve more years of school. I was shocked and dismayed. It seemed an unimaginable burden, so far in the future that it couldn’t be real. But it was real. While teachers misspent much of the classroom time, the next eleven years passed faster, and more happily than I expected. Some of the curriculum was worthwhile and some of the other kids could be fun.

When I reached Twelfth Grade, our school had an amiable exchange student from South Africa named Andy Lindeque. Andy was a wispy, cherubic soccer player with long, wavy light brown hair. He spoke with a vaguely British accent. Andy and I had first period History and fifth period English together. We quickly became friends.

Andy was more worldly than I and the other kids in my working-class suburban town were. No kid I knew had ever been outside of the US. Sheesh, other than some day trips to New York City and biennial visits to my extended family in a Pennsylvania coal town, I had scarcely left New Jersey. For that matter, other than my hometown and a few shore points, most of my own small state was Terra Incognita. But Andy didn’t look down on me or my—and newly his—provincial peers.

Andy’s experiences set him apart. For example, one time, someone noticed and commented upon Andy’s protruding navel. He explained, “I was born in the bush.”

While I knew that my parents were born in rowhouses, some Creedence Clearwater singer was Born on the Bayou, and one rambling Allman Brother was born in the backseat of a Greyhound Bus, I’d never met anyone who’d been born in the bush.

One day in English class, we were reading some poem that contained a cultural allusion that none of us Americans apprehended. Andy told the class, “He’s (the poet’s) mocking Americans. You know what people overseas say about Americans? They’re clean freaks, obsessed with showering.”

T.S. Eliot wrote, “We shall explore ceaselessly and at the end of our exploration, return to where we started and know that place for the first time.”

Unlike Andy, I hadn’t explored the world enough to know there was any other way to be than to take a shower every day. To not do so seemed uncivilized.

After high school gym classes, boys were required to shower. This freshman rite of passage was unsettling. A fourteen-year-old male’s parts can act up at any time, unprovoked. One perfectly nice, meek kid named Mike had such an unfortunate episode in the boys’ locker room shower. Or so I was told. Those who witnessed it ran out, screaming in mock terror. For the next four years, many guys called Mike “Rodney.” I didn’t have to leave New Jersey to know that kids could be cruel. Though when I did leave, I learned that kids in other places could also be.

Because we typically played for keeps in gym, I also learned that you could take your thirty-second shower and scramble across a big school, arrive late, anger the teacher, and continue sweating until your core temperature dropped. Adolescent life is messy. We were Born to Be Wild, Born to Run and Born to be Alive. It was a lot to live up to.

Like vaxx mandates, the showers were non-negotiable; the gym teachers threatened to flunk anyone who didn’t immerse. Yet, like so many threats school officials threw at us, this threat was idle. Passing gym was mandatory and school administrators simply couldn’t afford to have substantial numbers of kids repeat school years. The shower mandate should have taught students an important life lesson: a small group of recalcitrants can stop ostensible authorities cold. If, in response to a vaxx mandate, you had refused to work, could your employer have promptly, suitably replaced you and many of your colleagues?

But there was then—and still is— a cultural undercurrent of passivity and conformism. Thus, no resistance was organized. Besides, only “dirtbags” would complain about taking showers. I later found out that the girls didn’t shower, and I don’t remember any boys calling girls names over it. It’s hard to think of people as dirtbags when you have crushes on them. And I guess girls didn’t get as sweaty playing badminton as boys did while wrestling, etc. In any event, I didn’t see any dirt on either girls or boys, though maybe I wasn’t looking closely enough.

Public school officials strived to convince youths that perspiration was bad, and that showers were essential for good health. It was another element of The Hidden Curriculum. Cleanliness was said to be next to Godliness. Though, ironically, those who self-identified as clean would uncharitably and mercilessly mock the slightest failure of another person to meet the unwritten Clean Code.

I like the sensation of a shower as much as does anyone. When I saw the 1924 black and white, silent documentary The Epic of Everest about Tibetan mountain dwellers that said they never bathed because they were never near warm water, I felt very sorry for them.

Yet, to live vitally is to sweat. Although I’ve been in close quarters with many people in many public places, played a lot of sports, done much team physical labor and danced deep into the night—but never ‘til the break of dawn, not even once—in crowded clubs, I’ve never been around someone whose sweat scent made their presence intolerable. I don’t feel threatened by, or think less of, people who don’t shower every day. I see bathing as a physical comfort preference. I’m certain one’s food choices influence one’s health far more strongly than does one’s bathing routine.

Andy’s cross-cultural comparison suggested to me that an intermittently unshowered body was a high school version of first grade’s “cooties;” unseen and innocuous, yet stigmatized. Both could be used to devalue, and pick on, those whom people disliked for other reasons.

When Coronamania began, I remembered what Andy had said decades earlier. America’s obsession with apparent cleanliness became deeply dysfunctional. Americans thought they could magically sterilize the world or, at least, seal themselves in an imaginary bubble, via some superficial, superstitious measures.

People went OCD crazy. They stayed home. They ordered takeout and even groceries, and disinfected these. They wore rubber gloves or washed their hands until they were raw. They installed Plexiglas barriers. They Clorox-ed train cars and buses; it didn’t matter that almost no one was riding these. Masks were widely required. Even when they weren’t required, many people masked up voluntarily. Inside automobiles. Alone.

Many never considered that these measures couldn’t block tiny viruses. The important thing was that the above-listed measures made it look like there were physical barriers to viral transmission. Lockdowns, wipedowns and barriers, masks—and later, vaxxes—fostered a self-congratulatory delusion of scientific sophistication and control. Much Covid-OCD was also driven by peer pressure; many thought that other people would like them if they wore masks. Most of all, maskerading was virtue signaling; it enabled mask wearers to see themselves as good, and to simultaneously think they were shaming the unmasked neo-dirtbags, a/k/a “grandma killers.”

But really, the important thing was to build and sustain fear. Unbelievably, it worked.

Despite their stated devotion to “The Party of Science,” most Corona crazies didn’t know that they are—and have always been—surrounded, and even inhabited by, hundreds of trillions of microbes. There are 300-500 bacterial strains, and in aggregate, 38 trillion bacteria in the average human body. There are more bacteria in your body than there are human cells. There are over 1,000 types of bacteria on your skin. Dangerous bacteria tend to perish in the presence of light or air.

There are 380 trillion viruses in the average human’s virome. All of these can move around, and even through, most masks. Many viruses, including Coronaviruses, are zoonotic, i.e., they can live in, and be transmitted by, other animals. Thus, even if a given virus could be iso-eliminated from human populations—and it can’t—animals could still harbor the virus and pass it back to humans.

In general, these microbes are not only not lethal, they’re indispensable. Kids who play in dirt are less prone to allergies or asthma and are generally healthier than those who don’t. Healthy gut bacteria break down food so people can absorb nutrients and regulate lipids. Further, researchers increasingly see a gut bacteria/brain connection; healthy bacteria build sound minds. Bacteria also combat various infections, including Coronaviruses. Reciprocally, some viruses kill bad bacteria. The human microbiome is initially conferred from mother to child as a baby passes through the birth canal. Ewww! The microbiome is greatly fortified by breastfeeding. Ewww!

During Coronamania, people somehow forgot that they had spent countless hours over decades in close proximity to many other people. They forgot that we had been crowd-surfing and bro and sis-hugging each other for many years. It had been fun.

And though there’s been a two decade-long STD epidemic, neither individuals nor public health officials have tried very hard to prevent the free sexual exchange of microbes. Bathhouses and other pick-up spots were widely tolerated. Web providers didn’t censor prostitution or hookup websites, though they did censor pro-Ivermectin and anti-vaxx truth. Public service announcements state the disproportionate impact of Covid in minority communities but we don’t hear that STDs are 5-8 times more prevalent among minorities and that half of new STD cases are among gay men. More Politicized Science.

Since high school, I’ve seen more of the world. I’ve been to Nicaragua three times. Keeping things clean is not a priority there. In the many open-air food markets, stray dogs wander freely among, and sniff, food displayed at ground level and urinate alongside it. Merchants perfunctorily, futilely wave at flies to shoo them off meat and fish. I’ve eaten much of this food, as well as the street iguanas the merchants vivisect right in front of you, and never gotten a hint of queasiness. In contrast, I’ve puked up US restaurant food many times, even from some purportedly better restaurants. Macro-appearances of cleanliness can be deceiving. In Nicaragua, as in many other parts of the world, hunger is a much bigger problem than is keeping flies off food.

I still haven’t been to Africa. But it’s had a third of the Covid deaths per capita as affluent nations have had, even though I’m told that Africans don’t live in immaculate settings or have luxe hospitals. Africans are younger, thinner, more active, outdoorsy people. And they probably don’t inflate Covid death tolls as much as Americans do.

Going out and exchanging some droplets with other humans is healthier than is sitting on your sofa watching Netflix and eating Cheese Doodles. Americans’ medical system is based on reactive, allopathic measures, such as pills and surgeries, and not on proactively building health and, therefore, immunity.

The last two years have been American mental illness on parade. Many people have adopted the psychosis of the lowest, most anxious common OCD denominator. The seeds of germophobia were planted in their youth. The Covid Scare provided fertile soil in which this craziness could sprout, take root and enable this cleanliness obsession to fully blossom.

The ostensibly spread-stopping Covid-OCD measures were simply political theater. As Fauci finally admitted 26 months into the Scamdemic, you can’t hide from a virus over the long term. Nor can viruses be Lysol-ed into oblivion. And they won’t frustratedly wither and die because they can’t find people to infect.

To be mentally healthy, people must live among other people. Doing so requires people to accept and withstand microbial exposure. Unless you were very old or in poor baseline health, the Coronaviruses gave you essentially nothing to worry about; and even then, very little to worry about. Instead of vainly trying to wall off or eradicate viruses or taking mRNA injections, with all of their risks, more viral exposure could have hastened the development of natural immunity.

Most people never knew that they have always swum in a sea of microbes. Their Biology and their Physical Education teachers failed to say so; they were too focused on stuff like binomial nomenclature or shower enforcement. Educators—including college professors—deserve failing grades for misfocusing their students by teaching a bunch of test-able buzzwords instead of broad, useful Biology concepts.

The public health “experts,” media execs and lockdown/mask/test and vaxx mandate politicians who effected the Scamdemic should be Gulag-ed, long-term. Showers once a week, whether they need them or not. Cold.