Editor’s Page

COLUMNIST Editor’s Page

By Victoria Schmidt Trying a different tactic

It’s been two years now, and everywhere I go I hear the

“C” word. Get your minds out of the gutter! I am talking “COVID” or “CC” “Complaining about COVID.” I, personally have heard about all I care to hear. It is 2022 and they still haven’t found a cure for the common cold, so you should be grateful they even have vaccines for COVID! That is my cure, my attitude adjustment. I’m going to start being grateful.

First, I’m grateful I haven’t gotten COVID. I am grateful that simple, uncomplicated things like washing my hands, and wearing a mask and social distancing are easy ways to help keep myself safe. I am grateful that the medical community has told us the ways in which we can stay safe.

I’m grateful that somewhere along the line I was granted common sense and patience. I’m grateful that as a student of history I have seen how we survived the previous pandemics. I’d be really grateful if the naysayers would just keep their thoughts to themselves. Grandma always said, “If you don’t have anything nice to say about something, don’t say anything at all.”

So, I’m grateful for grandma.

Each day I’m going to start off being grateful for something. Like today, getting out of bed feeling well, I was grateful for. Grateful that I have responsibilities and that I have reasons to get out of bed. I’m really grateful for the Internet every day because it makes my life so much easier. And I am grateful for my friend who gets me out of trouble with the Internet because the software designers keep insisting on upgrading everything. I might even be so grateful to those software designers if they gave me an “opt out of upgrade for this slight fee” option so I can pay to keep things the way I understand them.

I’m going to be really grateful when I remember to tell my landlady about that dripping facet. And when I find that cockroach that has been hiding under the sofa finally shows itself, I will be grateful when showing it the door.

When I am stuck in traffic I am grateful that I have a car to drive, even if it is just a loaner. And I will be thankful when I master knowing exactly which day of the week it is. I am grateful that my smart phone does know the correct day of the week.

When you stop and think about it, there are a lot of things to be grateful for every day. We just have to change our mind set. I don’t know how all this COVID business will end up, but I am grateful for the doctors and scientists researching it. To the people treating it. For those who are no longer dying from it. And for the lessons we are learning from it. The goal is to learn so that we may be better prepared for the next thing that comes along. I’m very grateful for that.

[Correction: Last month’s editorial was attributed to Sally Asante by my error. Sorry Sally. It really should have simply said Staff, as several contributions were made.]

By Lorin Swinehart

“DO YOU BELIEVE THAT! DO YOU BELIEVE THAT!” Growled the huge man standing in line behind me in a North

Carolina supermarket. He was overflowing with bellicosity and ignorance in response to a young clerk’s reminder that he maintain a six-foot distance between himself and others during what was the most dangerous period of the recent COVID pandemic. I could not help but think to myself, “Big, dumb, and menacing.”

The anti-vac and anti-mask crowd are representative of a long tradition of know-nothingism that has characterized significant sectors of US society from the beginning, an attitude composed of anti-education, anti-science, anti-logic, anti-reason and on not a few occasions bigotry and racism. In the interest of accuracy, it needs to be said that knownothingism as such emerged as a primarily anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant political movement in the US during the 1850s. Over the years since, the term has come to have wider application. The purpose of education is the liquidation of ignorance, an exhausting challenge in an era when so many are proud of their ignorance.

The know-nothings have always been with us. Not too many years ago, they attempted to convince us that such engineering feats as the launch of the Space Shuttle was changing our weather. And yet, the same sorts today will energetically, even vehemently, deny the very real menaces posed by global warming and rising ocean levels. More frightening, they now rant and rave against the immunizations that are saving countless lives.

Vaccination has been a lifesaving procedure for decades, preceded by inoculation. Most of us take vaccination for granted. In the course of my own life, I have been immunized against diphtheria, hepatitis A, pertussis, smallpox, rotavirus, pneumococcal, pneumonia, rubella, polio, shingles and COVID, as well as tetanus on more than one occasion and influenza on an annual basis. The vaccines came along too late to spare me the miseries of measles, mumps, and chickenpox.

I had a good friend who spent his life on crutches because he had contracted polio in his early teens. Recently, it was reported that a man named Paul Alexander contracted polio in 1952 and has been in an iron lung for seventy years. I remember news reels showing a room lined with patients encapsulated in iron lungs, the stuff of nightmares for anyone at all claustrophobic. Some children in our neighborhood contracted polio. I wonder now if whenever my sister or I complained of a sore throat, a headache, a fever, particularly in the summertime, our parents didn’t inwardly panic.

When Dr. Jonas Salk announced on March 3, 1953, that he had created a polio vaccine, we rushed to share in the lifesaving discovery. In 1962, Dr. Albert Sabin developed an oral vaccine, making immunization even easier. Thanks to vaccinations, a life inside an iron lung was no longer a threat.

On February 5, 1777, General George Washington ordered all members of the Continental Army inoculated against smallpox, the first mass immunization in American history. Such early leaders as Washington and Franklin were products of the Enlightenment and accepted the discoveries and procedures of the science of their day. Much earlier, in 1721, the Reverend Cotton Mather and Dr. Zabdiel Boyston introduced inoculation to America during a smallpox epidemic in Boston.

In its day, smallpox was as fearful a scourge as polio was in the 1950s or, more recently, the COVID pandemic. It was characterized by high fever, vomiting, and mouth and skin lesions. Eventually, fluid filled bumps would appear all over the skin. It was spread, as so many of the maladies that torment us do, by droplets from the noses and mouths of infected persons. Smallpox once killed an estimated 400,000 persons each year and caused blindness and other lasting debilitations in many others.

For years, some had learned a few things about smallpox simply through observation. It had been widely known that farmers who worked closely with cattle never caught smallpox. Those who

became infected with cow pox, a disease common among cattle, appeared to acquire immunity to the more deadly human variety. Benjamin Jesty, an English farmer, scratched the arms of his own wife and children with needles that had pierced cowpox pustules. While his neighbors raged against him, no one in his family caught smallpox.

It may have been Lady Mary Montagu, who brought smallpox inoculation to Europe. While her husband was serving as Britain’s ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Lady Montagu learned that the Turks used the procedure to prevent the dread disease. She had her children vaccinated sometime around 1717. The Turkish technique was to create immunity by inserting pus from an infected person into the vein of a healthy person.

When Dr. Edward Jenner announced that smallpox could be prevented by injecting healthy people with cowpox pus from infected bovines, the reception was not universally favorable. Some clergy argued that inoculating people with pus from deceased animals was ungodly. The lure of profit underlies much of human misbehavior, and there were physicians who feared loss of revenue if smallpox was completely eliminated. On at least one occasion, demonstrators erupted into the streets, some wearing cow horns, burning Jenner in effigy. One newspaper argued that Jenner’s procedure would cause people to grow horns and give birth to calves. To prove his point, Jenner inoculated a milkmaid named Sara Helmes with pus from an infected cow named Blossom. Ms. Helmes never caught smallpox.

One person who had little doubt regarding the dire consequences of smallpox was British commander Lord Jeffrey Amherst during the Seven Years War, 1756-1763. Lord Jeffery initiated one of the earliest forms of biological warfare by distributing as gifts to Pontiac’s people, his Native American adversaries, blankets that had been slept on by smallpox patients. In a 1763 letter to Col. Henry Bouquet, Amherst suggested, “Could it not be contrived to send smallpox among those disaffected tribes of Indians. We must on occasion use every stratagem in our power to reduce them.”

In a later communique, he further ordered, “We must try every other method that can serve to extirpate this execrable race.”

Over the subsequent winter, 3/4 of the people of the Ohio Valley succumbed to the pox. Today, Amherstberg, Ontario, and Canada’s Amherst College are named in Lord Jeffrey’s “honor.”

In 1989, the World Health Organization announced that the scourge of smallpox had been eliminated. A disease that had once wiped out entire populations in the Americas and across the islands of the Pacific is no more because of the availability of vaccinations.

There have been epidemics, even pandemics, in the past. The Black Death of the Middle Ages and the 1918 influenza scourge come readily to mind, as do incidents of malaria and yellow fever. In those cases, medical science had not yet reached the sophistication of today, and most people lacked educational resources necessary for the comprehension of the causes and treatments for disease. In those cases, they cannot be blamed for falling back on folk medicine and even superstition. Those who compose today’s lumpen proletariat, however, more closely approximate the determined mindlessness of the snake oil advocates and witch burners of days of yore. Lacking the mental discipline or acumen to seriously attempt to learn much of anything of consequence, they fall back upon the rumblings of political or religious hacks and the pacifiers offered by pulp publications.

Not unlike those villagers who attacked Jenner are those troglodytic individuals who today refuse to be vaccinated or to take reasonable precautions, such as mask wearing, in the face of the COVID pandemic, who turn to vaccine misinformation and attempt in their mulish way to refute irrefutable science. The current strain of know-nothingism exists at the end of a long line stretching backward in time into the very darkest corners of the human story. While there may be reasons why some who suffer from rare medical conditions should not receive vaccinations, others simply prefer to risk their lives and the lives of others in their stubborn refusal to behave as responsible members of civil society. But perhaps that is the computer chip injected into my arm by the kindly nurse who administered my vaccination talking. Lorin Swinehart

By Blue (circa Feb 2000)

Last week my good friend Linda Samuels celebrated her sixtieth birthday with a oncein-a lifetime street party near Six

Corners in the Village of Ajijic. Linda moved here four years ago after a thirtyfour year career with the New York City Board of Education on the Upper West Side/West Harlem in Manhattan. A real city girl, she headed towards the lights of Guadalajara. She stopped enroute to breathe the fresh air and listen to the sounds of Ajijic. She never reached Guadalajara.

Linda chose a home in the village on a street often used for parades and village celebrations. Her home is built around a courtyard. It is an old, Mexican style home, filled with treasures from various parts of Mexico. You have to walk through the garage to get into the house and you can’t get into the garage on the nights the lady across the street opens her doors to sell homemade tamales because the street is filled with parked cars.

Linda speaks fairly fluent Spanish from her many years of working with Latin children in New York and has made many friends in the local community.

At six a.m. on the morning of her birthday someone knocked on her door. Musicians sang her the traditional birthday song which begins “How lovely is the morning that we come to greet you…” The singers also brought the hot cinnamon drink called canela with just a touch of tequila to warm up the early morning. Everyone entered her home and stayed for an hour, singing, dancing and making merry.

Plans for her party began in earnest about two months before her January 19th birthday celebration. She wanted a memorable one which would make both her foreign and Mexican friends comfortable but didn’t know how to go about it until she heard about friend of mine in Jocotopec who had planned a street party.

Originally she counted on about 100 people. A week before the party, she planned between 250 and 300. She checked with our equivalent of the City Hall and got permission to close down one block of the street. The police offered to provide a guard for the occasion. Free beer, is what I’m sure they were thinking.

The company she bought beer from provided tables and chairs advertising their beer, of course.

The neighbors pitched in and hung paper decorations across the street above the tables. Offers to help with the food poured in from everywhere.

The tamale ladies prepared 300 tamales. Linda ordered 85 kilos of beef.

A Cuban friend provided Cuban black beans and rice, and other neighbors fixed up traditional Mexican beans and rice. Her maid put together a huge prickly pear cactus salad.

The Mexican food was enjoyed by all. Served with beer, spiked punch or soft drinks, we all ate and chatted and listened to the music, served up by a local Mexican disc jockey.

Linda declared: “I want salsa. I want dancing music. I want my guests to get up in the street and work up a sweat.” It warmed my heart to see children dancing with parents, Mexicans with Gringos, and everybody having a great time. The party started at six p.m. Folks came and went, but I stayed until the ultimate event.

Linda had ordered a three-story structure made of bamboo, called a castillo. Castillo means castle. The structure is covered with fireworks that, when lit, start spinning and shooting into the air. They light each other. After the four sides of the structure have performed their magic in the starry evening skies, the finale begins. The top of the castillo spins in a dizzying array of fireworks, causing the children to squeal with glee and run around under the spray, protecting themselves under empty cardboard boxes.

After dinner, the birthday cake was presented among cheers of Mordida! Mordida! I normally think of mordida as being what you pay the police when you don’t want a ticket. As she leaned over to bite off the corner of the cake, they pushed her face in to it. I guess there are always new traditions to learn about. The part of the cake indented with her face was cut off and saved for her own personal use.

Linda served a hot canela (cinnamon) drink with the cake and the party ended about 10:30. Of the 250+ folks there, maybe 150 were invited and, in the traditional Mexican way, those who were invited, invited their relatives and friends to come along and join in the fun.

This will be a difficult act to follow when I turn sixty.