A sad realization for the boys

Out strolling, the boys didn’t want to go home just yet, so they begged to go to Kroger. “There isn’t much food there anymore,” I told them. (The store’s final closure is scheduled for this evening.)

They begged to go anyway.

So, we walked up and down the all-but-empty aisles. The boys were shocked. Samuel cried all the way home.

“I’ll only drink water now,” he said.

“Why, Sammy?”

“Because Kroger is closing forever.”

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A few remarks about my other sons, so as to be fair to all.

Daniel was treated to another solo outing (that is, without his brothers). Here he is at the zoo, with his Grandpa Scott. Notice how he’s leashed.

Abel has learned to scoot forward on his belly. When not impeded, he beelines for the cats’ plates. He overturns them and licks the pellet-food.

Today he seized the Trollope novel I was reading and tore its cover.

It was The Warden, which details the misdeeds of churchmen and reformers. A novel of enduring relevance.

I’d turned to it after reading Hatch’s Democratization of American Christianity (for the group).

(Jane Austen is a clergy critic, too.)

Some ethical reflection

Consider two declarations:

(1) In 2016, Trump said: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters.”

(This seemed pretty hyperbolic at the time. Now, not so much.)

(2) Three days ago, it was revealed that although Trump knew that the coronavirus is highly transmissible – and that it’s “deadly stuff” – he held large gatherings and was slow to promote social distancing because he “wanted to always play [the danger] down.” “I still like playing it down,” he told Bob Woodward, “because I don’t want to create a panic.”

These actions – shooting somebody in the middle of Fifth Avenue (hypothetical) and knowingly playing down the danger of COVID-19 (actual) – have a great deal in common, morally speaking. They’re both deadly; they’re both deliberate; and, on the face of it, they’re both outrageous, or they ought to be.

Exercises. Answer the questions of either Set 1 or Set 2, and those of Set 3.

Set 1. (a) What are the morally relevant differences and similarities between the two acts? (b) Which of the two acts would it be morally worse for Trump to do?

Set 2. Recall that Trump’s electoral opponent this cycle is Joe Biden. When Trump made the first declaration, in 2016, his opponents included Democrats Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, as well as Republicans Jeb Bush, Ben Carson, Ted Cruz, John Kasich, and Marco Rubio. (Trump has never run against Hitler or Stalin.)

Given whom Trump competes against, would voters be morally justified in remaining loyal to Trump …

(a) … were he to shoot somebody in the middle of Fifth Avenue?

(b) … even though he deliberately and knowingly played down the danger of COVID-19 – and even though his action may well have caused many thousands of premature deaths?

Set 3. Can these exercises even be done with any seriousness, or are the answers so obvious that it would be a waste of time?

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Though I condemn Trump for his response to COVID-19, my own response has fallen well short of what I think it would be good for people to do.

Today, I attended Rick’s funeral. It was held in a crowded gym.

Oh, I wore a mask, but I was there far too long for the risk to cease to be negligible (see the first chart in this useful article).

I came away with a souvenir – a t-shirt with this caption:

I WENT TO

RICK’S MEMORIAL

AND ALL I GOT WAS

THIS LOUSY T-SHIRT

I pray that that’s all I and the other mourners came away with.

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Of course, this isn’t to say that the same countervailing considerations apply to my situation and to Trump’s …

Or that I couldn’t make tradeoffs to balance off my action’s increased risk to public health. (Could Trump make tradeoffs on the scale that his action demands? I doubt it.)

Still, I remain very dissatisfied about what I did. I hope that, for his own sake, Trump also can acquire a sense of dissatisfaction.

R.I.P. Rick

Karin’s stepdad, Rick, died today. He was fifty-five. His body housed many illnesses: among them, pneumonia; we’re not sure which one killed him. When we saw him a few weeks ago, he looked frail, shriveled up. He needs to go to the doctor, we said. But with typical stubbornness he refused to go to the doctor. Karin’s mom told us he seemed tired of living: he would barely eat, and he’d talk about dying. Last weekend, he collapsed and lost consciousness. The medics almost took him to the hospital, but he awoke in time to dismiss them.

The following Monday, he went back to his job. Then he stopped working.

He was employed as a chef. Some weeks, he’d work ninety hours. His body was always sore.

A gruff, irreligious man, he was reconciled with God some two weeks ago, Karin’s mom said. It was the first time she’d seen him at peace.

Karin & I are very sad. We would’ve especially liked for Samuel to know him longer. He was very kind to his grandchildren. He put up with a great deal of nonsense from the rest of his family. He had a piquant, rather absurdist sense of humor. He was an ardent Vikings fan; the Vikings, of course, never won any Super Bowls, and I don’t think Rick ever won anything, either. That’s all right: a wise man once noted that ours is a religion for losers.

Rick left it late, but I think that at the end, he was prepared – he had the requisite humility. He was small enough, as another wise man once put it, to crawl through the eye of a needle.

Here he is with his dog, George, whom he lovingly called the “Swine.”

Iterations

Karin & I hosted a dinner party last night. The guests were Karin’s grandpa, Karin’s mom, and Brianna. We had to spray Jasper with water to keep him away from the food. Even shy little Ziva came out of hiding a few times, and we had to spray her, too.

We discussed the Vikings’ dramatic playoff victory, which, in solidarity with Karin’s stepdad, we all had witnessed. (Here are some rather lengthy highlights, as well as the game’s winning play and the same play from a field-level perspective.) Later in the evening, Karin’s mom told me that “buffalo” is a verb. To buffalo is to baffle. Researching this, I learned that grammatical sentences of n words can be formed simply by saying buffalo out loud n times, for any cardinal number n; and that the writing of such sentences requires minimal punctuating. Here are a few examples:

“Buffalo,” a command to do buffaloing.

“Buffalo buffalo,” a command to do buffaloing to buffaloes.

“Buffalo buffalo,” which states that buffaloes do buffaloing.

“Buffalo buffalo buffalo,” which states that buffaloes do buffaloing to buffaloes.

“Buffalo buffalo buffalo,” which states that Buffalo’s buffaloes do buffaloing.

“Buffalo Buffalo buffalo,” a command to do buffaloing to Buffalo’s buffaloes.

And so on.

I stayed out of bed until one o’clock forming longer and longer sentences from iterations of buffalo. Then I lay awake in bed until three o’clock. This morning, bleary-eyed, I went to my first regular tutoring shift of the new semester.

Mother’s Day

On Mother’s Day, I was with my in-laws – especially, with Karin’s father’s family. This photo depicts us in Goshen, Indiana, at the house of Karin’s paternal grandparents.

(Brianna – who belongs to Karin’s mother’s family – sits next to Karin. The older man with the NRA thermos isn’t Karin’s father. I don’t know who he is.)

(I, of course, am the one standing with his fingers in his pockets.)

Karin had to explain to Brianna (who’d never visited the Goshen house) who all the relatives were. “And my Uncle So-and-So was married such-many times and has such-many children – and there are a few others who may or may not be his children. …”

I asked: “Does this mean that some people may or may not be my cousins?”

“Yes,” said Karin.

“You look too delighted about that,” said Brianna.

I was even more delighted to be reunited with Sammy, Karin’s grandpa’s small, grumpy dog. (Sammy and I get along so well that he barks and barks whenever I’m about to leave.) At seventeen, Sammy has frosted eyes and a walk that’s decidedly creaky. When he barks, both his front paws rise off the ground.

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Returning to South Bend, Karin drove in the wrong direction. Then, after she righted the course, she speeded and was given a ticket. She was sad for a bit, but she recovered. We dropped Brianna off at Karin’s mother’s house, and I was reunited with – and climbed all over by – George, the nice dog that Karin’s stepfather brought home one night.