If empathy had a body it would be a bloated corpse in America today.

I just read an opinion piece in the New York Times called "Each White Flag: A Life Lost to Covid." This particular article focused on a participatory art project by Suzanne Brennan Firstenberg entitled "In America: Remember." The Times article goes on to explain that each white flag in Ms. Firstenberg's project represents a life lost to Covid in the United States. Visitors were invited to personalize and dedicate flags to honor loved ones who had died. What the Times did to make it more personal was they filmed these hundreds of people mourning. You can hear them crying, talking softly, and the wind flapping all the hundreds of thousands of the white paper flags. It was a beautiful thing to watch, very poignant, and I was moved by it even though I didn't walk through the project myself. So then I clicked on the hundreds of comments to see what people wrote about it. Here's what I found immediately (my comments/analysis are in italics:

From a person called Walker: "A high proportion of these people were elderly and would be dead anyway by now, covid or no. In the meantime many of them were forced to die alone due to draconian isolation rules. And many more died due to the loneliness and neglect caused by lockdowns and regulations that limited healthcare, increased addiction and mental illness, and caused financial losses. It's time a real analysis was done of the true impacts of this pandemic, direct and indirect. This type of simple count is next to meaningless."

Wow. Old people were just going to die anyway.

From Indy970: "The theory of evolution still holds: it's the survival of the fittest. While it is extremely sad to hear of these numbers, the reality is that it is very challenging to fight viruses and bacteria in an increasingly mobile world. Add to that the state of obesity in this country, no one should be surprised. The good news is that science and government intervention has protected over 99.7% of the US population. To put that into context, over 50 million people died globally during the 1918 pandemic with 675,000 in the US when the population was much smaller."

Hot take: no one should be surprised that fat people died in droves.

From C Clark: "The stupidity we are witnessing leaves me speechless."

I'm confused by this one: How can someone look at so much death and then call us all stupid for feeling something?

From David J:  "Yes, thank you for the article, and, of course thank you for the flag memorial. But I’m afraid it’s all for naught. America shrugged off the hundreds of thousands of lives, and are still squabbling over the wearing of masks. And one state has even made that horse medicine nonprescription. So much ignorance."

TL;DR: Americans are ignorant; I don't have time for this late News Flash. I'm actually surprised you had time to read the article and then comment. From someone who doesn't care, that's a lot of effort.

From RJ: "Why not flags for cancer deaths? Or traffic deaths? Or the deaths caused by domestic violence and suicide precipitated by misguided lockdowns? Asking for a friend..."

Wow. I actually don't care for anyone but myself. However, I need to virtue signal that all lives matter so I don't come across as a complete monster.

From Jim: "In the US, each year about 600,000 people die from cancer and about 700,000 people die from heart disease. That’s more than 2.5 million since covid started. The obsession with covid deaths is about things other than dying."

So...this guy is calling out mourners as having an agenda to shame other people? It takes a special kind of person to stand in a field of the dead and point fingers at grieving people and declare, "Don't you try to blame me for this!"

Anyway, I was unprepared for the vitriol of the comments that were made on The Times article regarding this art installation. A lot of America doesn't have any empathy anymore. I'd say about half if not a little over half. That's around 200 million people. How do we have a functional society when 200 million people don't give a shit about what happens to the other 200 million? Like...that's a serious question. To put it bluntly...if you were literally on fire, half of the people wouldn't help you put it out if it meant any inconvenience to them. You'd just burn.

We are in such a strange place in this country, and (more and more) I have an answer to the question I ask myself everyday: why is life so hard? It's hard for many of us, because (increasingly) you got to go it alone. There is nothing and no one to help you at all. If empathy had a body it would be a bloated corpse in America today.

I finally got my first Covid vaccine shot but the process of finding an appointment left me with a few questions.

I finally got my first Covid 19 vaccine/shot on Saturday morning. I also learned that I might have qualified for it a lot sooner. My job is in rehabilitation, which means that I work with people every day who are disabled. I am literally in and out of people's homes two to three times a week. Sometimes it is scary, going into a home to do an assessment for an hour, and the people in the home do not want to wear a mask. Usually, they have obliged me (begrudgingly). But I live in a heavily red state, and a lot of the people here think that Covid is a thing that was made up by democrats to make President Trump look bad. Just last week I was in a home with three people, none of whom were wearing masks. Two were seated on the sofa playing video games on the big tv. The third was who I was meeting with. I decided to get in and out as quickly as possible, and I wear PPE. But it is still rather nerve-wracking. It has been that way for almost a year, and I've been able to avoid getting Covid thus far.

Well, now I've been vaccinated. But it was weird. Urged by my brother to check to see if I could get the vaccine, I went to a website called vaccine finder. You only found this website if you went to the Utah Department of Health website, which has a hundred links on it. The vaccine finder was one link on the Covid page. It was not the main link. You had to scroll down to find it, but it was there. Once you went to that link, you checked to see if there was vaccine in your area. To do that, you had to plug in your zip code. Okay, then. That's what I did.

So then I got a list of businesses on the smartphone that showed they carried vaccine. There were names like Walgreens, Kroger (Smith's), other grocery stores like Dan's or Harmon's (both in my area), Walmart, and the list was extensive. Some had little minus signs underneath them that indicated they were out of stock with words. Some said they were in stock. Okay then, you chose one to click. Then it would lead you to another page that asked if you would like to see if they had appointments available. If you clicked on that button, nearly all of them required that you download the store's app. So now I have Walgreens and Walmart both on my smart phone. Others required that you just register an account, and now I'm receiving email from half a dozen places that I wasn't receiving email from before. On one account, I couldn't remember the password and login, so I had to go through the process of resetting the password. This required getting sent a special link and then logging on with a one-time password sent to my "verification account."

Anyway, once I got past all of that, many times I arrived to find out that there were no appointments available. They were all booked. But I kept trying, clicking on name after name. Oh...this one requires that I answer some questions first. Oh now that I've answered those questions, I have to remember my login. Oh I've never used this store before, and they want me to create an account. Okay account created, but they don't have any appointments. Darnit. On to the next place.... And so on and so forth. It took over two hours of going through things to finally arrive at one that did have appointments. But then it required that I call the Department of Health to make sure I qualify. I did that, and they approved me. So I went back and selected "Health Worker," which is what they told me to do...and then I got in and got my appointment. After that, all I had to do was show up with insurance and with proof of my eligibility. I was issued an essential worker letter back in April...and this is what I needed to use. With that in hand, I got my shot.

Look...I want to be clear that I don't mean to whine about any of this. All of that work was worth it. I got my Covid shot and the next one is on March 20th and already scheduled. In case your wondering, it was the Pfizer vaccine. However, my experience was "hard." In other words, I'm saying that it was difficult (not easy) for me to get an appointment for a shot. Since this time, I've helped four other people get appointments for shots who qualified. In each and every case, I asked the qualifying person (based on my conversation with the Department of Health) the question, "Have you gotten scheduled for your Covid shot?" They all replied, "I think I qualify but I honestly don't know how to do it? Do you have a number I call?" In fact, here in Utah, there is no number. You have to go through the process just like I outlined above. And I showed them how to do it.

My question is: why the hell is getting signed up for this crucial vaccine so hard? Only tech-savvy people are going to be able to do this. Anyone who is uncomfortable with technology is going to be screwed trying to navigate all of the pages, the logins, the signups, and the questions. Click this, press that, answer this disclaimer, do you give us permission to share this information with the department of health? and blah blah blah. It was almost endless (or seemed that way). Each and every person is going to have to go through a web of bureaucracy that is as complicated as filing taxes, and most people don't do their own taxes because they don't want the headache of doing so. Yet, this vaccine is more important than taxes. So why haven't they made it easier for everyone to get?

That being said, I hope all of you out there who have not received the vaccine get it soon. I hope that your sign-up experience is much easier. Maybe it's just because I live in a "red" state. Republicans make everything much more difficult than it has to be. I'm worried that vaccine is going to waste. There was no one in line at my appointment at Walmart on Saturday morning. There was just me, and the one person sticking me in the arm.

I will be sad if movie theaters do not survive Covid 19.

I love movie theaters. I love going to the movies, getting snacks, obtaining prized seats at the local IMAX to be blown away by a four story screen and digital surround. I love movie theater 3D, and eating ice cream in the cool dark while I know that outside it is sweltering and sunny. These are memories I have of movie theaters, and quite simply...I love them.

News broke yesterday that AMC theaters is probably not going to survive Covid. They are making essentially zero dollars during the pandemic, and they won't be able to open "business as usual" when all the green lights are go. And it also remains to be seen if even they were allowed to open "business as usual" if anyone would ever return to the theater in large enough numbers for them not to go extinct.

This is heartbreaking on many levels for me. I love movies, but I also know the realities of capitalism in America. It is difficult to make it in our country, because greed has continually increased rent and land values to a point that the only way a business can be successful is if they are churning money hand over fist. I am continually surprised at how expensive it is to live in the United States, but the "heat" has been turned up so much on just about everyone...that the only way anyone is fine is if things are firing at 100%. That's great if you can keep up the pace, day after day, week after week, year after year.

When you can't keep up that pace...it feels weird that you just go extinct. That things collapse so readily and handily that you just cannot survive. Why did the people that came before me think that this was okay to do? Why did our elders and people who are no longer around who laid the foundations of this country come to the conclusion that a one-bedroom apartment in a city should cost $2300 a month? Why do small businesses have to pay $40,000 a month for renting a space? Like...why is that a thing?

I look at headlines at the cost of things and have many WTF moments. To put California's power lines underground to help with wildfires would cost $243 billion dollars.  Seriously? Why is it that expensive. Why does it cost $243 billion dollars to bury power lines? I don't get it. The scale of everything just seems out of control. Anything that breaks down in my house always costs at least $1,000.00 unless you do it yourself. My family pays the nurse who takes care of my father $1200 a week. He gets great care and he deserves it, but holy crap is that expensive. People seem to be completely out of touch with how much things cost.

A wheelchair ramp made of aluminum for my friend's house was $3,500.00 for ten feet with a rail. To fix the head gasket in my Ford Pickup and to correct broken seals around the transmission cost me $3,000.00. I paid it, but I was left thinking...why is everything so expensive?

Who are the people who can keep up with this kind of pace at how fast bills come at you fast and hard? People are going to fall off this treadmill. It isn't sustainable. The fact that we are losing art institutions like movie theaters is just a canary in the coal mine. In my opinion, we have raised the cost of living and doing business in the United States to toxic levels. I guess we shall see soon enough how it all turns out in a post-pandemic world.