THE ENDLESS SUMMER

As Summer 2024 winds down, I reflect below, in writing, as I have often in my mind, on the Coronamanic Summer of 2020. I use the present tense to reflect my continually expanding sense of disappointment, disaffection and disbelief during that bizarre season.

—-

In some ways, Summer 2020 is much better for me than it is for others. I’m working outside, doing officially “essential” work managing a set of community gardens in New Brunswick, New Jersey. I deal daily, and at close range, with many people, half of whom are Mexican immigrants, unafraid of “el vee-rus.” I have to ask them about it; they never bring it up. It’s good to be around an unconventional cohort who haven’t lost their heads. And who know, from life experience, what a real threat looks like. Their reaction is “Lo que sea.” (Whatever).

But in some ways, my Summer 2020 is much worse than is most other peoples’. I have to watch, at close range, two of my adult kids lead boring, isolated lives, wrongfully deprived of age-appropriate, face-to-face experiences. Seeing this daily reminds me that tens of millions other young people are suffering similarly for no good reason.

Though I think, and tell the under-30s I know, that they should be protesting and defying the restrictions.

In May, like legions of other students, after functionally missing the second halves of their final semesters, they graduate. My son gets a Masters from Carnegie Mellon University in, of all things, Public Policy. Officials and, presumably, faculty at that institution support closing a setting of largely 18 to 25-year-olds over a virus that—data clearly show—doesn’t threaten them, nor anyone in remotely good health.

I wonder how “expert” the Public Policy professors at Carnegie Mellon’s “good program” are, given that they support measures that so clearly contravene the public’s interest. Carnegie Mellon has plenty of underperforming company. Nationwide, few academicians ask any questions about the eminently questionable Covid overreaction. This thunderous silence feels very much like a conspiracy. As they’re failing when needed most, and flubbing such an easy analysis, how good/what good are any university Public Policy programs?

On a late May 2020 Sunday morning, my wife Ellen, and I watch our son’s unceremonious ceremony on a computer screen. Grads like him tune in from their apartments. No one sits or stands next to his/her friends, sings the alma mater or throws mortarboards as high as they can into a sunny sky. No families dress up, hoot or holler for their favorite grad, pose for photos or go out to share a meal. The screen doesn’t convey happiness or a sense of achievement, progress or relief.

To the contrary, graduates are entering a profoundly, artificially disrupted society and economy with dim career and social prospects. While graduation speakers traditionally veer into social commentary, the speaker refers only obliquely to the biggest elephant that’s ever been in any commencement ceremony’s room. What’s about to commence? The US is in an induced coma.

A week later, defying nearly nationwide emergency orders banning gatherings and allowing only ten funeral attendees, thousands meet in many US cities to protest George Floyd’s Minnesota death. No one needs a Master’s degree to see the social-distancing double standard.

That same week, our younger daughter completes the requirements for her Bachelor’s degree from the University of Alabama. Bama administrators have the good sense to conduct an in-person graduation. But they “cautiously” postpone their ceremony until midsummer. My daughter won’t attend because her apartment’s lease expires on June 30 and she doesn’t want to pay for the return trip. Like most grads, neither she nor our son has savings. Nor are they eligible for “enhanced unemployment” payments.

Thus, instead of moving to new places, our two erstwhile scholars return to live with Mom and Dad. They’re great company. But at this age, they should be living independently, meeting people their own ages.

—

On the 1,000-mile drive home from Alabama, sick with what turned out to be mononucleosis, our daughter becomes fatigued and strikes a North Carolina guardrail, rendering the car undriveable. After the car is fixed, I have to reclaim it.

Thus, the second week in July, Ellen and I take a largely empty Amtrak train nine hours to Raleigh. Despite the low ridership, passengers are required to wear masks. In stores, I’ve been flouting New Jersey’s mask decree: go ahead and kick me out of H- Mart. But I don’t want to be thrown off the train and stranded. So I wear a paisley red bandanna beneath my chin, like a Golden Retriever, until I hear the conductor open our train car’s door. After she walks by, I drop it again. (BTW, I’m good at catching Frisbees, though not with my teeth).

Thankfully, a high school friend with whom I had reconnected at a 2016 reunion had then urged me to stop by if I was ever in North Carolina. She lives a half hour from the repair shop. When, in Summer 2020, I tell her I’ll be in her area, she invites me and Ellen to stay at her house, where she lives with her husband/surgeon and her 86-year-old mother. We two couples ride in the same car to share dinner at a nearly deserted Indian restaurant in nearly deserted Chapel Hill. I deeply appreciate our hosts’ hospitality when so many have lost their heads.

—

On the car trip home, Ellen and I stop at various places.

Late on the first day, while driving west on a winding, hardwood forested, two-lane county highway bound for Roanoke, Virginia, we climb, going 40+ mph, toward the top of a hill. Simultaneously, a UPS truck comes, fast, over the hilltop in the opposite direction. As the tree line has a hillcrest gap, when the truck ceases to block the low sun, I’m suddenly blinded by the light. At the last second, I pull the car to the right, avoiding, by the narrowest margin, a head-on collision with this wide, tall vehicle, which had, as I also had, crossed the center line.

Life can change or end in an automotive instant; I’ve known people for whom it did. And life does almost change or end for Ellen, the truck driver and me. We’re almost killed by something I didn’t see coming; victims of circumstance, because during the mania, delivery trucks are increasingly common; even late in the day on rural roads.

Our Holiday Inn Express on Roanoke’s eastern edge is eerily quiet. The parking lot has plenty of empty spaces. The lobby is empty and dimly lit. There’s no Muzak. It seems deliberately somber. The fitness room and pool are closed. Downtown is similarly quiet. We’re the only diners during a long, dimly-lit Middle Eastern dinner.

The next morning, instead of the normal, crowded, noisy sit-down hot buffet breakfasts in hotel lobbies, the desk person directs us to a table on which sits a row of small, brown paper bags. A printed message reminds us to take our cold breakfasts and go on our way. Consuming the bag’s skimpy contents in that common space is deemed dangerous. We find a downtown cafe with outdoor seating and eat omelets in early sunlight. Almost no pedestrians pass on the adjacent, sunny sidewalk.

We head to West Virginia. The first afternoon, we bathe/bask alone in a stream. The next, we, along with dozens of others, ascend Seneca Rock, with its sheer face 900 feet above the valley floor. Late in the day, we swim in a deeper stream with a dozen twenty-somethings. Seeing that group having fun seems strangely, pleasingly normal. Country people seem smarter than the city people who are hiding from each other.

The next day, we visit my 84-year-old ex-welder/Renaissance man/uncle, who lives on a South Central Pennsylvania hillside farm. As always, we enjoy his company. He feeds us some foraged mushrooms and serves us homemade wine. We talk about what an overreaction this whole thing has been.

Later that afternoon, we drive further east and share a three-hour, laugh-intensive outdoor restaurant dinner with Bill, my best friend from my youth, and his wife in quaint Middletown, Maryland.

It will turn out to be the last time I see Bill. He will die in April 2021 at 62, after his dormant blood cancer re-emerges. I later suspect that he vaxxed in February 2021. Working for a defense contractor, he was eligible early on, and a believer in medical interventions.

On the trip’s final leg, I had hoped to visit a close, long-time friend in Eastern Maryland. Part of the connection we shared was based on seeing various social conventions or trends as silly. But responding to an email I had sent a week before, he declines to meet, even outdoors. He says he’s “following the protocols.”

Seeing him internalize the lunacy disappoints me. Family and friends should be a reliable, grounded support network. They should afford each other special status, worth taking risks for, especially when these risks are microscopic.

But for many, this isn’t happening during the Scamdemic. People trust and value their TVs, radios and computers more than they trust or value people they’ve known for decades. Some friends email me and say, “Let’s get together when this thing is over.”

I lose their phone numbers.

—

Prior to and during our six-state trip, various politically-grandstanding states, like my native New Jersey, impose quarantine rules. By themselves, the quarantine rules should tell anyone who didn’t already know that the “Pandemic” overreaction is a politically and economically driven crock. How, for example, could a virus infect more people if these people move between two towns in different states instead of moving between two towns in the same state?

Interstate quarantines are intended to promote the myth that the states that locked down harder are safer. Ostensibly, delusional—really, just disingenuous—bureaucrats don’t want those traveling from “unclean” red states to carry disease into enlightened, virtuous, “sanitary” blue enclaves like New Jersey.

But really, politicians and bureaucrats want to punish the sane and sensible who have the temerity to dissent and travel. These officials figure most people don’t know that all states had very nearly the same official—and very low—infection and death rates, even using figures derived from a grossly overinclusive testing method. Or that Coronamanic, travel-banning New Jersey and New York have the highest official death rates. When quarantining—and later, vaxx-mandating—Democrats say Republicans “demonize” others, I shake my head. Again.

When I return to New Jersey, large, electronic, capital-lettered, 1984-ish warning signs above major highways instruct interstate travelers to call a hotline to learn their up-to-date quarantine status.

As if.

This is perhaps the crowning touch of Covid theatre. But most people gullibly continue to believe government officials who, in turn, must double over laughing amongst themselves about the megaprank they’re perpetrating.

—

Locking down in March was a stupid idea, even if it had been just for two weeks. But if officials had kept their word, Summer 2020 would be normal. The problem is that the CARES Act put $1.9 trillion out there for opportunists to tap into. Receiving “stimulus checks” and more money to stay home than to work has pacified people. Those who get to skip their commutes, do less work, surf the Net by day and watch Netflix by night are uneager to return to normal.

Keeping schools closed not only gives school employees ultralong vacations. It also preserves the illusion of crisis upon which Democrats plan to capitalize in November. Exaggerated Covid fear, an unprecedented basement campaign and mail-in ballots are paving the way for The Neo-Manchurian Candidate, Biden.

Despite five months of this pseudo-crisis, no one I ask knows any remotely healthy person who’s died of the virus. But they still act as if this virus is widely lethal.

—

When we get home from our five-day trip, we see the difference between our kids’ lives. By extension, it shows how the Scamdemic harms some much more than others.

The Bama alum had lined up a job in March. Hired on the basis of her resume and an online interview, she’s working from home for a Washington, D.C. non-profit. In the two years she will work for this entity, she’ll never go to the office, not even to onboard; their office was closed the whole time. Her workday seems easy. Often, she listens in on meetings while making handicrafts. The staff argues about what color scheme the office should have when it eventually reopens. She knocks off by 4 PM.

Two years later, she’ll find another job in which she either goes to an office full of people every day or travels for business.

Our son has it much harder. Older, and with fewer career-type jobs available, he spends ten-plus hours/day, seven days a week looking for work. It’s painful to watch someone so earnest put in this predicament by those who’ve effected this scam.

It will take him eight months to be hired by 45-employee company. Almost none of the 45 go to the office. I don’t know when he starts that job that, three years later, he’ll still spend most of his 50-60 hour workweeks alone, on the computer in his apartment.

I suspect that many of my kids’ peers are also living in this socially compromised way. This must be widely damaging mental health.

—

When this Scamdemic began, I knew that politicians wouldn’t/couldn’t close the beaches during Summer 2020. New Jerseyans love their beach time and beach houses. Beach-blockaded people would have revolted. Closing the beaches would have crossed timid Caucasians’ George-Floyd-line-in-the-sand. Politicians knew that enforcing ludicrous social distancing rules in either context would have been political suicide. The Scamdemic’s cynical implementers know who they can mess with, and who they can’t. None of the restrictions are science-based.

On various Summer 2020 afternoons, Ellen and I drive 45 minutes, as we had in preceding summers, to the beach late on the weekday afternoons with the best weather. We stay until the sun sets. By 7 PM, we usually have the beach to ourselves.

One such evening, a solitary couple approaches from a distance on an otherwise empty beach. As they get within 100 feet, I recognize the male as a high school classmate; I know he lives in that area. He and his wife are the only people within a quarter mile in each direction. I call his name and we have a short conversation at an unnaturally large distance. They’re both wearing masks. I think, “These two are not mentally well.”

That night, eating a takeout dinner on the Asbury Park boardwalk after dark, we watch people stroll by. Many wear their untrusty blue masks. I suspect they can still smell the salty air, though magically, no viruses pass through. One fiftyish woman wears a full-face plastic visor over the blue magic. I wonder if she lifts and lowers these to eat cotton candy.

—

One weekday evening, my wife and I take a normally full, but now nearly empty, train to Manhattan for an outdoor dinner with our other daughter, who lives on East 116th Street. We walk there from 33rd Street. Normally bustling Midtown is nearly deserted. The only people near Radio City are shirtless, unkempt and unhinged. Some act out, loudly. Normally, police clear the homeless from such neighborhoods. But for now, pockets of unhappy anarchy exist within the desolation.

Uptown, where more people live, is livelier. When we sit down at one of the hundreds of new sidewalk dining shack/venues, we have to examine the menu on a phone because some other patron may have touched a paper menu and spread their cooties.

My daughter’s urban students often need summer school to keep up. But there is no summer school. Education officials, who purport to care so much about our youth, insist that it’s too dangerous for 15-year-olds to assemble. Do they think young people are sitting home alone, hiding from each other? Union leaders and members know these kids will fall further behind without the structure and haven that schools offer. While most teachers are under 40, they wave their arms about infected teachers dying. At least potentially. In theory.

—

I turn on the TV one night and see a pro baseball game with no fans. They pipe in crowd noise and background music to cover the silence made by the cut-out faces that replace flesh and blood, 3D spectators. Fauci humiliates himself by effeminately throwing out the first ball. A photo shows him in the stands with his mask down.

Midsummer hockey and basketball playoff games are also fan-free, played in front of long rolls of vinyl draped over empty seats. TV sports are another circus measure taken to pacify the pathetic masses. At summer’s end, football resumes with partial crowds. Though a sportswriter named Pat Forde predicts that multiple college players will die of Covid infections, none does. (Like other alarmist assertions people made that spring and summer, this statement seems to have been scrubbed from the internet). Fauci says hosting football fans created an ideal Covid breeding ground and that players would “shed the virus all over each other.”

Zero players or fans die.

I put signs outside my house, but few people walk by and notice. So I make a sign that says “Flatten the Fear” and screw it into my bumper. A guy pulls alongside me at a traffic light, glares at me, waves his fist angrily and speeds away. Lo que sea.

—

All summer, despite all of the disruption, the virus is killing zero people I know. Very few are even sick. The same is true for everyone I ask. If, by May, this virus isn’t killing anyone they know, it clearly—and predictably—isn’t nearly as bad as touted. Nonetheless, the apocalyptic ethos persists.

The gyms I used to go to remain closed. So do the churches. After having been police-taped for months, I don’t have to sneak into the parks anymore. But the basketball rims are still gone. I fake, dribble my ball and bank it off an empty backboard. I imagine that every shot goes in. This delusion is unsatisfying; as with the Scamdemic, generally, I desire and miss the truth.

The TV still runs “public service” ads telling people to stay afraid. Some ads assert that people of color have been hit harder by Covid. I know many people of color. They’re all fine. Unless I’m visiting my parents, I never watch the news. But their stations and the limited TV and radio I consume describe a world much more perilous than I see with my own eyes.

—

Political convention speeches are typically moments of grand pageantry, delivered before packed arenas and followed by torrential balloon-fall. But in late August, Biden walks into a theatrically silent, dark empty room, and in front of eight American flags, reads a phonily dire acceptance speech. He says 170,000 people have died of a virus. While he accusatorily says that Europe, Canada and Japan have had better outcomes than the US, he fails to mention the very advanced ages of those who died, or that far more Americans are obese, or that American hospitals administered lethal treatments or that American hospitals and nursing homes over-reported Covid deaths.

When his teleprompted nonsense ends, the doom and gloom magically evaporate. Happy music suddenly begins and vapid, smiling groups of individuals applaud on eighteen side-stage plasma-TV monitors. Stern Uncle Joe instantaneously and incongruously transforms into happy Joe as his wife comes on stage and kisses the old man on the mouth for far too long. His handlers are trying way too hard to make this raspy, shuffling guy seem vital.

The not-so-young lovers unauthentically beam as they wave to those flat-screen Americans, as do Harris and some other guy who wander onto the scene. It’s the deepest of deep fakes.

Thereafter, Biden campaigns rarely and only in front of small groups of reporters who stand, preposterously, in white circles distant from each other. Biden now says Covid has killed 200,000 people. Ignoring that all of these people were super-old or sick, he says, if Trump had done a better job, “They’d all be alive today!”

Witless partisans cite this figure as gospel.

I console myself by naively thinking that the government will end the charade after the election. The past six months have been a painful process: moving between naive hope that people will come to their senses and then, continually realizing that they won’t. When I complain about the nonsense, most complacently shrug and say “What can we do? There’s a ‘Pandemic.’”

Though vaccines normally take ten years to develop and test, there’s talk that a vaccine will end this nightmare. I see no need for a cold vaccine. These have never worked before; viruses adapt. I suspect the government and media will falsely credit the shots for ending this contrived crisis. And praise lockdowns for protecting us until the vaxx cavalry rode in. Whenever this shot comes out, I resolve not to take it. When Biden and Harris vow not to take any “Trump Vaxx,” why should I?

Hey, wait a minute...

—

Summers are usually transcendent. The days are long, the weather is warm and the corn, tomatoes, cherries and watermelons are sweet. Responsibilities lighten and people go on vacations. Lightning bugs flash and lakes and oceans sparkle.

Like planetary clockwork, by late August, the days always shorten visibly, portending and evoking a sense of appropriate return to a higher-functioning normal.

That’s not true now. I live two blocks from my town’s middle school and high school. When September arrives, I’m used to hearing students chatter as they pass on the sidewalk in front of my house, as do seasonally-migrating birds. But my street remains quiet. Schools are closed, with no hint of a reopening date.

It’s disorienting. And melancholy.

What are we returning to? And when?

****

I’m very interested in peoples’ 2020 memories. Please share these in the Comments or via email. Substacker Transcriber B has faithfully and persistently recorded hundreds of peoples’ Coronmania experiences. It’s important to make a record that counters the revisionists who lie that “We never locked down” and “Schools didn’t close,” et al.