Not too bright, we are…

There are times when it sure seems we got the name wrong.

Homo sapiens – “wise human” – that’s what we choose to call ourselves. But as of late, we sure haven’t been living up to the name.

Again and again we hear from folks who’ve drawn losing numbers in the Darwinian lottery, creating real concern that our gene pool is growing shallower and shallower.

Since the first archaic amoeba squoozed through the protozoic slime, self-preservation has been the hallmark of a successful species. The struggle to stay alive and healthy eventually gave the turtle his shell, the bee her sting, and homo our sapiens – which we appear to be forfeiting right and left – though more obviously on the right.

It appears we are witness to a remarkable moment in evolutionary history – the first time members of a species are consciously opting to embrace death and disease in the face of life, health and safety. And are ever-so-proud to do so.

On Wednesday the Minnesota Department of Health reported 2,077 new cases of COVID 19 in the state, 800 people hospitalized with the infection, and 31 dead, bringing Minnesota’s September COVID death toll to 228.

Let that sink in. In Minnesota alone we’re burying more than 200 fathers, mothers, aunts, cousins, friends and neighbors dead of a disease they didn’t have to catch. We have a vaccine – three of them, actually – that would have prevented that.

It’s free. It’s everywhere.

They chose not to take it.

Instead, our fellow hominids rally for the freedom to contract a preventable illness and the right to spread highly contagious disease to whomever they may encounter.  

Tuesday evening a number of these folks gathered in the county parking lot with signboards and placards to hear a self-described “armchair epidemiologist, virologist, psychologist and now I’m becoming a lawyer” declare unequivocally that “masks don’t work.”

The gathered bipeds cheered her on, apparently favoring the declarations of a self-styled savant to the findings of the American Association of Pediatrics which filed a brief in Iowa federal court to block a ban on mask mandates in schools, stating that “their review of the research and the experience of the front-line pediatric practitioners ‘prove beyond any doubt that universal mask policies in schools significantly reduce the spread of COVID-19 in school populations.’”

Apparently, the distaste for appearing in public with a “face diaper” exceeds their concern for adding to the 5.5 million child COVID-19 cases reported as of Sept. 16 – more than 15 percent of the total COVID cases in the country.

Parents rallying for the right of their children to get sick … who’da thunk it?

And, no doubt, they’d strongly favor the lawsuit brought against the University of Minnesota seeking to put the kibosh on the U requiring all students to be vaccinated against COVID – just as it requires all students to be vaccinated against a host of one-time common childhood diseases. Diseases no longer common because of vaccines…duh!

“We don’t need the government of anyone else telling us what to do with our health. We can take care of ourselves,” the YouTube educated expert told the crowd … the irony of the misinformed leading the misguided into life-threatening mistakes entirely lost on the assembly.

Evidently quite a number of folks do need the government, their employer, their college, their … somebody… to tell them, require them, to do what real doctors, epidemiologists, virologists, psychologists, and even lawyers have found to be in the best interests of public health – everyone’s health. To put it bluntly, your right to spew doesn’t trump my right to breathe.

You’d think they’d get that…

But then, what is it we say about the dodo?