The numbers may lead us astray

Now that we have spent a year staying away from people, fearing invisible enemies, learning to cope with the inconvenience of wearing masks in many situations, we have -- amazingly -- vaccines that promise to eventually eliminate most of the hospitalizations and deaths resulting from COVID-19 infections.

But people need to take the vaccines to change the national dynamic, with over 500,000 deaths behind us. 

When I read in today's Denver Post that only 29 percent of registered Republicans in Colorado say (in a survey, and I know these can be questionable) that they will NOT be vaccinated, that makes me sad for my neighbors, my friends, and my own family.

Sheer stubbornness and political tribalism might extend the scourge of the pandemic, if people simply refuse the most effective way to deal with this virus.

But I take hope in the reality that people often say one thing and do another. That's bad for pollsters but good for those of us who actually observe what happens around us.

For instance, my neighbor is a widowed Catholic Republican who has often expressed skepticism about everything from vaccines to who is really running our neighborhood HOA. 

A few weeks ago a neighbor from the other side of her house was outside helping this widow take down some holiday lights and I stepped over to help for a few minutes. Dick, her other neighbor, asked if I had had my shots yet and I was able to say we had our first shots scheduled. He has family in Longmont, and was combining a trip to see them with a quick trip to Fort Collins, where he has his own appointment for the vaccine. 

My neighbor just looked at us for a while and then said she was probably not getting the vaccine. She offered no argument and we didn't ask for one. But she did mention that one of her sons, who lives near San Diego, wanted her to visit but insisted that she quarantine for a week in a hotel before she could actually enter their house. 

Just a few days ago, my neighbor announced to me while we were getting mail that she was on several lists for the vaccine. 

Would she be among the 29 percent, as far as a survey goes? Probably. But she wants desperately to see her grandchildren and other family and that week of quarantine is not for her.

She will be getting the vaccine, grumbling all the way, I would guess, and looking forward to sharing tales of her adverse reaction in the future. She may use her pain and suffering to make her family feel guilty and to get some needed attention. But she will get her shots.

That connects to another story in today's paper that says a survey finds that nearly 70 percent of Republicans don't believe President Biden was legally elected, but that nearly 50 percent of Republicans approved of the recovery package that he is leading through the legislature.

People are more complex (and maddening) than polls can capture.

Lowering the bar to success clears the mind

Sticking with my exploration of saved posts and links from Facebook, a more recent save was from The Atlantic magazine, titled, "An Ode to Low Expectations."

It's brief and mostly about a moment from 30 years ago when the writer was feeling a bit down about things and about not meeting his own expectations, but mostly I time-traveled to long before the 1990s, and my father sharing this nugget: "Keep your expectations low and you will never be disappointed."

That's a very Midwestern thing to say, based on a mythology that life sucks, and then you die... but there ARE moments of joy and satisfaction, so hang in there. 

Any kid raised in Iowa in the 1950s knows this about life: Don't get too full of yourself and don't start thinking the victory is won. Life will soon remind you of reality.

I'm still a Hawkeye fan -- looking forward to watching both the Iowa men and women play Michigan later today, back-to-back, on TV -- but here's how I go into games like this, with Michigan being the favored team in both contests: We will likely give it a good go but we won't win. 

I will likely blame a combination of the referees and fate, along with the relatively small population that Iowa can draw on for athletes, and, for the women, the lack of fans screaming support and pulling the team through tough moments. It's nice to know how it is most likely to go. My low expectations won't keep me from watching and occasionally shouting at the screen. Hey, those young athletes need my help.

And if either (both? hush my mouth) team manages a win, the experience will be so much sweeter. 

I know this in my heart (and the heck with whether it is true or backed by science): as soon as I find myself expecting success or victory or a top mark or even a thank you, the precise opposite is going to happen. 

Interestingly, this does not make me depressed or pessimistic. I am open to the win.

I just think of the good results as gifts and the bad results as life's baseline.

Getting it right takes careful attention to details

I have a habit of seeing something that MIGHT be of further interest on Facebook and quickly hitting SAVE. I always promise myself that I will get right back to that item when I get a spare minute.

But I get caught up with something else and many times don't get back to my list of saved items for days.

There is something satisfying about cruising through those saved Facebook links and UNSAVING the majority. This is akin to the feeling we get when we can cross out items from our to-do lists. 

But here is an excerpt from a link to a post by one of my favorite writing experts, Roy Peter Clark, and it relates to something I have mentioned before about "getting the name of the dog" when reporting on an event. The entire post by RPC is here.

"...All this is prologue to a recent and quite startling example of this strategy from Michael Hardy, a Houston-based journalist writing for nymag.com. The headline of the Intelligencer column reads: “Ted Cruz abandons millions of freezing Texans and his poodle, Snowflake”

The column chronicles his drive to Cruz’s “uber-rich” neighborhood and his approach to the senator’s “white, Colonial Revival-style mansion.” He sees what appears to be in a window pane of the front door a white dog, apparently left behind after the senator went “jaunting off to Cancun with his family.”

The point of the advice about getting the name of the dog is that facts and details are important, and you never quite know how they might add something to a story or report. But read the entire post to see the wider implications and to encounter a limitation RPC found in the story as it was published.

I can't quite shake the image of poor Snowflake, shivering in a chilly house, forlornly waiting for the family to return to play with him/her. 

I'm part of the 6 percent club!

The estimate is that the vaccine reaches its full protection effects about two weeks after that second shot.

My wife and I had our second Pfizer shots this past Sunday, with some arm soreness for a day but no other flu-like symptoms, and we are looking at being able to at least consider some "normal" activities by March 8. 

I see that 5.89 percent of the country has had BOTH shots at this point, which seems like a "too small" number, but I can sense momentum. About 14 percent have had ONE shot, which seems like better news.

We are seriously considering starting to travel again, maybe to visit our grandsons in Seattle who we have not see in person since Christmas, 2019.

How about that? 

On the other hand, I found out that a 7th grade cousin of our granddaughters here in Denver tested positive and has cold-like symptoms. And one of our son-on-law's brothers and his wife have the virus. They live in Golden. The wife has lost taste and smell, and we hope that will pass soon.

And you still see stories of adults in the 40s who get the virus and end up going to the ER due to breathing problems, including a neighbor of our Denver daughter. 

The observation yesterday that the U.S. now has recorded over half a million deaths due to COVID-19 prompted some news stories and the White House held a memorial to honor the dead and all those living affected by those deaths. 

But I think of all those deaths as "just a number," I guess. No one in our families has died (thus far) of the virus. 

Just like "all politics is local," so is the case with grieving over premature deaths. If the deaths are not local, it's tough to fully engage the heart, at least for me. 

Millions are still boiling water in Texas, to cite another major crisis, and that seems more immediate to me since I have quite a few friends in Texas and they regularly have reported on their ruined floors and walls, their frozen pipes, their searching for water and food. 

It's all a good reminder of a key aspect of news: proximity. If it doesn't happen in my neighborhood, it's tough to get quite as fired up about it.

A surprising place to find great writing examples

If you are looking for writing models, consider reading obituaries -- believe it or not.

There are professional journalists whose job is to "pre-write" most of what will eventually be printed when someone well-known dies. Then the writer can focus on more timely quotes and details when the celebrity actually passes away.

There is an art to creating a quick biography, but some of that art lies in interviewing people in search of interesting anecdotes and memorable moments... not all that different from writing a memoir.

Here's a great paragraph from the New York Times obit for Cicily Tyson, who died at age 96 last week:

"Tyson had a remarkable physical presence, someone sculpted as much as born. Her body was dancer lithe. She seemed delicate. But only ‘seemed.’ She was delicate the way a ribbon of steel holds up its part of a bridge. The deceptive nature of her fineness was right there in the name. Cicely Tyson. Poise and punch."

The boldface is from me. What an amazing image. It's a comparison that is close to a metaphor, but it's the contrast between "ribbon" and "steel" that carries the weight here. The writer's point was that Ms. Tyson was anything but delicate.

Please also note the rhythm of this graf, with lots of short sentences, or "not even sentences." "Poise and punch" is not a "complete sentence, for instance, but the writer is using language to reinforce the major points. That "punch" plays with the accident of her last name being shared with a famous boxer, and seeing that is an assumption the writer made -- that most readers would "get it."

A good writer can break the rules, clearly, but the reason for breaking those rules has to serve the images and the readers. 

BREAKING NEWS: Politicians want YOU to do the right thing

So many politicians have been caught being hypocritical lately... and social media and cameras in every pocket or purse don't help them. Whether you are the mayor of Denver or Austin, or Ted Cruz, or the governor of California or of New York... someone will notice you doing precisely the opposite of what you ask of others.

My brain tells me that not all politicians are crooks and liars, but my heart has other ideas.

But here's today's real rant: the real struggle is between the rich and the rest -- and it has always been that way. No matter the political party, the rich always seem to make out OK. 

My heart wants to make fun of Texas and its weird self-obsession and constant bragging about independence and toughness, but that was never really true and now seems to have become a way to avoid any blame for poor decisions. 

Texans will still boast and chant "Don't mess with Texas" while eagerly accepting emergency aid and charity from across the country. 

Self-deception is not confined to high incomes.

My brain reminds me that most of the people truly suffering in Texas were struggling to make it long before the polar vortex. Just as COVID-19 tended to kill our poorest and most put-upon citizens, so the cold and dark tends to hurt those same people.

The truth at the heart of it all is that it's the rich vs. everyone else, and the rich work very hard to obscure that truth. I'm not calling for revolution, but at some point don't we need to recognize that being hypocritical is just how the rich and powerful play the game? 

Real news would be finding a group of rich and powerful Americans who are NOT hypocritical. 

De mortuis nihil nisi bonum

"Of the dead, say nothing but good."

This long-time advice sprang to mind yesterday as the news of Rush Limbaugh's death from lung cancer at age 70 made the news.

I was surprised at the level of venom I found on my Facebook news feed, most of which said plenty of bad things about Limbaugh. 

I once had a sales route that ran through southeastern Arizona and towns and people are few and far between out there. The only radio station I could get for hours at a time featured Rush Limbaugh's show and I sometimes had to settle for that as a way to pass the long driving time between stops. I was not a fan of his politics but the sheer act of listening to him made me realize that he was a master of radio and of how to keep his listeners on edge, aggravated, and entertained. That was in 2001, BTW, before social media.

It's no exaggeration to say that Limbaugh primed much of the nation for what social media and cable TV has become.

Of course, Limbaugh managed to speak ill of so many for so long that perhaps people felt he had left himself open for "some of the same." I assume Limbaugh, in whatever form, might laugh about all the fuss, or simply shrug and point to his huge personal fortune (though he really can't take it with him). I doubt that the dead take much notice of social media.

The sheer volume of nasty comments (and I am making no judgments on the legitimacy of those) speaks more about how social media has granted permission for people to be as nasty as they wish, with few, if any, personal implications. After all, a nasty comment yesterday morning is soon lost among the cesspool of social media, where outrage and hatred and snarkiness never rest.

I suppose it is quite human to experience a bit of triumph when someone they dislike dies, but it is not an attractive phenomenon. I also suppose some posters have a creepy feeling even as they hit send, the creepiness prompted by what they know should be a higher standard.

But the past decade and more have loosened our tongues, reduced our sense of shame, and weaponized one of the things Americans hold most dear: free expression.