Blinded by the Sun Shaped Corona Virus

In these strange times, I wanted to record a bizarre conversation that happened last week.  We were in a meeting, and one person brought up the new corona virus.  He said, "I don't know that we need to make any plans yet, but I wanted us to be aware."

I said, "We're in much more danger of being impacted by the flu than by this new virus."  I had planned to point out that in South Florida, we're not even in danger of the flu in the way that we would be if we lived further north.

I was cut off by this comment:  "That's what they want you to believe."

I was stunned, but I said, "No, that's what's true right now.  It may not always be true--"

"Well, let's move on."

I was ready to move on.  I could arm myself with all sorts of facts and statistics, and I wasn't going to win that argument.  Well, in one sense, I wasn't going to win.  The people arguing the opposite point have convinced themselves that this new virus will kill us all, and even if we're still alive, they will figure that they just haven't won the argument yet.

I have had similar arguments about people who want to argue that the temperatures aren't setting records.  We can certainly disagree about the cause of why we have so many days of record breaking heat, but there are people who would argue that those records aren't true.  Even when I say, "O.K., let's just look back through the years when we've been keeping records that are mostly reliable by modern standards."  Nope--no concessions.

When my spouse and I were working our way through grad school, we knew that we'd be educating ourselves out of certain conversations.  We don't move in social circles that want to deconstruct literature over the Thanksgiving table or to argue about whether or not we can understand a brain outside of a body.  But that's O.K.  I can't understand the vaccine work that my brother-in-law is doing, but I won't argue that it's not important.

I work in the field of education, and I expected that students would be uneducated--it's the nature of being a student.  I didn't expect to find educated people who refuted facts and statistics as if some shadow group of scientists was working to confuse us all.

But that's the situation we're in, across all sorts of fields and disciplines.  It's a disturbing hallmark of modern life.