Can it Ever Be Normal Again?

Indiana Mark? I know a good ball player that came from that state….lol.(see my reply to Bear above).

The first 16 years or so of my life our family spent a 2 week vacation there, as that’s where my mom was from.

Gentlemen and Ladies— I am using the terms gentlemen and ladies to reach out to all of you because I believe that is what all of you are. The bickering about political discussions related to the Coranavirus pandemic seems like a “Red Herring” for all of us. It is getting more difficult for me to be as patient with my wife and mother-in-law as I commonly am and I believe it is due to the isolation of the “stay at home” order in Indianapolis. I believe a lot of this is because I am denied my opportunities to be out and about in the real world. Not being able to see people doing acts of kindness, having the meanlingless, meaningful conversations with strangers, acquaintences, and friends, and just being a part of humanity is decreasing my tolerance of those around me. I adore a good argument over almost any topic and would just love to challenge any of you with whom I disagree. But I am not going to allow myself to be drawn into this for this simple reason.

THE PEOPLE ON THIS SITE REPRESENT THE GREATEST COLLECTIVE OF MEN AND WOMEN THAT SHARE AN APPRECIATION OF, KNOWLEDGE ABOUT AND PASSION FOR THE LOS ANGELES DODGERS.

Please don’t fall into the trap of arguing about any other topic on this site and having to leave the discussions about the Dodgers just because of being on edge because of the pandemic. I would miss any of you once baseball returns because all of you provide me with knowledge and information about the Dodgers on a regular basis.

Just try to remember why we were all drawn to this site and ask yourself if what you may gain by discussing the failure of the governmental systems from the local, state and federal levels to see the potential for a pandemic to occur is worth the possible loss of the camaraderie and discussions that we all are here for.

Might I suggest that finding a site established to allow, condone, and encourage political debate might be an option to consider when the need for expressing your personal political views , whatever they may be, overwhelms you.

I carried a firearm while working for thirty years as a police officer and was never off-duty without a firearm. As an honorably retired police officer I now have a lifetime CCW and trust me when I say I have zero desire to be a hero, but I will protect myself and family from an attack.

My experience is we have little to worry about from the honest gun carrying CCW permit holders, but the gang bangers, drug dealers and psychopaths are the real problem. If you think you can survive an active shooter incident by hiding or running……good luck and I mean that with all seriousness. I’ll consider running and hiding in an active shooter attack if those are viable options, but without those options I’ll protect myself and won’t wait for the police to show up.

MT’s points are spot on!

I find it a really bad and depressing thing that everything now has become “political.”

For example, climate change, global warming, and the fate of life on our planet should not be political. But there are many who will not discuss it “because it is political.’ I have a strong opinion about which people made it political, but I will not go into it, except to say that if science has become political, than we are pretty much lost. Is it political to discuss Newton’s Laws, or at what temperature ice melts? Then why should it be political to listen to science, and realize that unless we substantially reduce the carbon pumped into the atmosphere, we will raise the global temperature to a point where billions of lives will be lost or greatly impacted? But some people do not want to believe in science. I realize that science is not absolute,and that new things are learned; but when thousands of scientists write and lecture about the dangers of global warming, we had better listen. Not listening is either because one is so dogmatically religious that one doesn’t believe in science, or that one is so wedded to making money off pollution causing activities. that one convinces oneself that the science is wrong, or that making billions of dollars is more important than anything else.

Similarly, there were people who ignored the clear warnings of pandemics in general, and this virus in particular. But because everything has been politicized, not only do many not want to broach the topic, but we know that we are going to get divided into the same two camps again, as we now are as a country with regard to everything. And that is very bad. That is an endless war which stalls progress and stymies hope. Everything is not “both sides.” And blame has to be based on the best set of scientific facts available, not shrugged off as , “We can’t get into that, because it will just lead to an unending argument’ I’m not talking about this site, I can understand the wish to keep it collegial and about the Dodgers. I’m referring to this horrible thing which has happened to America, where even the most obvious facts are violently fought against. Hundreds of years were spent to throw off the repressiveness of the feudal age; we went through the Age of Reason, and the Age of Enlightenment; and none of it was perfect, and there were fits and starts and disputes and wars, but we seemed to be making progress. But now I see us heading to a new Dark Ages, where literacy is down, people increasingly ignore science, and substitute authoritarianism and mocking of science, and, inventing “alternative facts.”The Church forced Galileo to recant, and this country killed so-called witches in Salem. Are we going back to that? Very possibly.

Saving lives is much more important than apportioning blame. But not casting blame is not going to help us in the future. Acting as if life is mostly a spin of the roulette wheel, so that no particular action is wrong or right, is giving up in the quest for knowledge, out of which supposedly comes the ability to make better decisions in the future, and just maybe evaluating people on any level in terms of their ability to understand science, and to marshal the most informed and capable people to help make the most reasonable decisions, not make them based on one’s own self-interest or a shrug of the shoulders. We can differ as to who those people might be, but can we at least try to agree that this is what we need, and that “both sides are wrong on this” (whatever the “this” is, at any point), is essentially a giving up, a

nullifying of the entire history from the Renaissance on, and just returning to what we are told by authoritarians, secular or religious, or proceeding by whim or guesswork? Why will humans do any better with the next impending crisis, if we can’t discuss who and what was most likely responsible for this one; and if we obscure it all with endless reflexive partisanship, what the Founders decried as “factionalism”?