Op-Ed

The first time it happened was bad enough.

“It” amounted to this: It was Wednesday afternoon, I had finished my column early and walked out to my car, parked in the alley behind my house. I was on my way to an art show — very excited. I got in the car — hmmm, why is it so cold in here? — began backing out, what’s that? It looked like there was something on my rear window. I got out, walked around back. Oh my God! My rear window has been smashed in! What I saw was a fragment of broken glass dangling in a corner.

Was this a robbery? I had two umbrellas in the back seat; they were still there. Nothing had been taken. Apparently it was plain old idiotic vandalism.

I almost drove down to the art show anyway, but soon enough realized I needed to get this fixed, so I swung back, drove over to my car-repair place. “What year is your car?” I almost couldn’t remember. Oh yeah, 2009, Toyota Corolla. They ordered a rear window, which arrived a day later. And the window was installed. Problem solved, life goes on.

As a medical virologist for over 30 years, I and many of my colleagues have been amazed what we have heard about the COVID-19 vaccine and natural immunity after infection by the virus that causes COVID-19, called SARS-CoV2. So much clear-cut information is known about this disease process, yet policies are being made that ignore this information. So, let’s discuss these facts in simple terms. Here are the six basic facts of viral immunity, regardless of the virus:

A few days after the Nov. 2 election, the New York Times published a vehement editorial calling for the Democratic Party to adopt “moderate” positions and avoid seeking “progressive policies at the expense of bipartisan ideas.” It was a statement by the Times editorial board, which the newspaper describes as “a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values.”

The editorial certainly reflected “longstanding values” -- since the Times has recycled them for decades in its relentless attacks on the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.

**  The Times editorial board began its polemic by calling for the party to “return” to “moderate policies.”

Several million dollars’ worth of fiction exploded the other day, leaving cinematographer Halyna Hutchins — age 42, a wife, a mom — dead, and plunging Alec Baldwin, who accidentally shot her, into a state of unimaginable hell.

This happened on Oct. 21, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on the set of the movie Rust. Despite the enormity of coverage the incident has gotten, I remain bewitched with incredulity over one unanswered question. Baldwin, the star of the movie, a Western, and one of its producers, was practicing his gun draw, using a prop gun he’d been given — except the gun wasn’t a prop. It was real. And it was loaded.

My question, of course, is: Why?

I use walking sticks when I walk nowadays, kind of like cross-country skiing in late summer, but I had no idea doing so would connect me with a guy named Joe and open a flow of aching love and the deep desire to matter.

“Can I give you a cane?” he asked.

This was in the alley two blocks from my house. I was pushing myself along — I love to walk in alleys for some reason, maybe because I never know what I’ll come upon — and I passed an older guy (around my age, that is) whose garage door was open. He was working at his bandsaw. As I walked past him, he turned and called out his cane offer to me.

I stopped, shrugged. In my 75 years on Planet Earth, no one had ever offered me a free cane before. We stood looking at each other. “Hi,” I said. We introduced ourselves. He stepped away from his bandsaw and I explained that I already had a cane., but thanked him. “This is what I do,” he said. “I make stuff. I give it away.”

An urgent task is awaiting us: considering the progression of events, we must quickly liberate ourselves from the limits and confines placed on the Afghanistan discourse, which have been imposed by US-centered Western propaganda for over 20 years, and counting. A first step is that we must not allow the future political discourse pertaining to this very subject to remain hostage to American priorities - successes, failures and geostrategic interests. 

Forced vaccination helped birth our nation.

As war erupted in the 1770s between American Revolutionaries and our British Imperial masters, a smallpox pandemic tore through the colonies.

The deadly disease killed by the thousands. But Supreme Commander George Washington made inoculation a decisive weapon of war.

The key insight came from a slave. In the early 1700s, an African “owned” by the Puritan preacher Cotton Mather introduced white America to the art and science of plague prevention. Stolen from his native land, Onesimus brought with him knowledge of the ancient method of inoculation.

As smallpox ravaged Calvinist Boston, Onesimus explained that injecting a small amount of infected pus under the skin of a healthy human would bring on a mild case of the disease … and then immunity. Despite intense resistance from the “civilized” white citizenry, Mather pushed the African insight.

Among those who trusted it … it worked, and countless lives were saved.

Several decades later, a 19-year-old George Washington traveled to Barbados with his brother, Lawrence. The trip was meant to cure Lawrence of tuberculosis, which later killed him.

We pretend to have enemies, but mostly what we “have” are people whose lives simply don’t matter. And then we kill them, either directly — via airstrikes or other war games, turning them into collateral damage — or indirectly . . . by simply failing to notice that they exist.

The moral idiocy of this transcends cruelty and indifference. We’re also killing ourselves. The idea that humanity — that life itself — is “all one” isn’t just a nice thought, an outreach of kindness, but the cornerstone of survival.

Take, for example, the concept of “vaccine apartheid” — denying developing nations, where so far 85 percent of the Covid deaths have occurred, adequate access to the vaccine.

One of the many preposterous claims coming from supporters of the vicious new Texas lawagainst abortion is that bounty hunters -- standing to gain a $10,000 reward from the state -- will somehow be “whistleblowers.” The largest anti-abortion group in Texas is trying to attach the virtuous “whistleblower” label to predators who’ll file lawsuits against abortion providers and anyone who “aids or abets” a woman getting an abortion.

Amid chaotic politics and anti-immigrant and refugee sentiments, Stadio Olimpico in Rome seemed like an oasis of social and cultural harmony. AS Roma and Raja Casablanca fans gathered in their thousands on a hot Saturday evening to cheer for their teams in a friendly match, the first in the Olimpico for nearly a year and a half.