ACK! Now I’m reconsidering going to the Y for exercise again, with Omicron raising its ugly head.
It’s a mutation of COVID-19 and considered of high concern. I’m vaccinated and boosted, and I’m convinced (as is my PCP, although I’ve haven’t been tested for antibodies) I had COVID early in the year it came to my state (we were the first state in which it was confirmed), so I should have super immunity against the new variation if anybody does, but the people I hang with and the people they hang with may not have that robust an immune system, and I could bring it home and spread it around if it’s circulating at the Y. I wear a mask there except when I’m in the pool, and I avoid touching surfaces, and I sanitize my hands before touching the steering wheel on the way home, but still…
So, until I learn more, I think I’ll just stay home and use my elliptical, consider getting a cheap rowing machine (there’s one for $85 available) and walk in the neighborhood when it’s decent enough outside. It sucks, but it is what it is. We aren’t out of the woods yet with COVID, frustratingly enough, so I need to do what I can to make sure I’m staying safe and not taking unnecessary risks until we are…
This morning I rode my elliptical for 30 minutes. Thought I’d be sore afterward but I wasn’t at all. Three days ago I rode it for ten minutes and I was surprisingly sore, but I swam at the Y yesterday for an hour and walked for an hour, and by then I was fine again. Today I didn’t feel any soreness at all.
Legs are amazing things. They really are. They recover and adapt so well. If they didn’t, I’m sure we wouldn’t have survived as a bipedal species! We’re not that great at climbing trees the way most other primates are.
AND SPEAKING OF SURVIVAL (what a great segue!)
I just read chimp researcher/savior Jane Goodall’s “The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times,” and I’m glad I did. It’s hard to stay positive about the state of the world. Most news is of the “if it bleeds, it leads” variety, so it’s good to hear what people are doing to avert the climate catastrophe that is looming in a way COVID can’t even compete. Failure to stop climate change will kill us all and most of the animals (except cockroaches and rats) with whom we share this big blue marble. We’ve really botched things up for our descendants.
Happily, I don’t have any descendants, but my sisters do. I can’t even imagine how freaked I’d be if I had kids and grandkids to worry about. I’m worried enough without having them!
My heart goes out to people who will inherit the challenge of saving us all from a very well-deserved mass extinction. I say “well deserved” because we didn’t insist on massive action and changes the moment we knew about the impending crisis way back in the 1970’s. (We had Earth Days, but no pitchforks accompanied them.) We gave the polluters and destroyers a pass instead of nailing them to the cross. If ever there was a time to storm the Capitol — not violently, but massively — it was way back then, to alert politicians that we were mad as hell and not going to take their coddling and glad-handing of the energy industry anymore.
Had we tackled the issue then, we may not even have experienced COVID, but with humans encroaching on habitats across the globe, infected wild animals came closer (and were brought closer by wild animal meat markets in China) and their diseases crossed over into our species: SARS, COVID, and more. When we foul our own nest, this is what happens. It’s science and we’ve known about it for nearly 100 years!!! It’s insane that we didn’t address it before it became a matter of life and death for everybody on the planet. We need to stop calling ourselves homo sapiens (“wise man”). We’ve rationalized our depredations instead of curtailing them.
I wrote a poem in the 1980’s about this very thing. Here it is, from my book LET NO DAY DAWN THAT THE ANIMALS CANNOT SHARE…
ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT
We are brothers, fallen from the same tree
Thrown upon a reality neither of us likes.
Your patch of forest daily shrinks
As our patches of earth grow.
You watch your cousin take what is yours
And somewhere beneath that brow you think you are doomed.
We have done it to our own species forever.
Why, then, consider a mere ape?
It is the Manifest Destiny theory at its worst:
And it comes from you, from all of nature,
To be what we are.
It is the Territorial Imperative.
Only we have no boundaries—
No mountain we can’t climb,
No river we can’t cross,
No climate we can’t conquer.
But wait! If it is a natural phenomenon, Why did YOU stop when you had enough,
You and the others,
Regardless of how much was left,
While we go on and on and on and on
At the expense of everyone else?
For there is no one else to stop us—
We are children raised without responsibility,
Answering only to ourselves.
Perhaps that is what will do it.
Perhaps therein lie the seeds
Nature so wisely planted.
And when that day arrives, wise ape, I hope you are still here, you and the others, to take up
Just what you are, just what you were doing
When your naked brother appeared, pretending he could bend this unalterable earth to his will
Thinking it would stay that way, and be okay,
And be his forever.
If I were anything but a human being, I might applaud when that day arrives.
I’m sure you will.
Yeah, not the most positive poem you’ve ever read, right? But Jane Goodall’s book does give me hope. The immediate past generation and the upcoming generation have it figured out. They’ve seen what our rapacious, sociopathic activities have done to the environment and to us as individuals and they have no intention of following in our footsteps, unless we’re Jane Goodall and the other so-called (derisively, by planet polluters and destroyers) tree-huggers who have never given up the struggle to set things right.
Proactive hope (not wishful thinking, but elbow-grease activity and holding the destroyers accountable) is what it takes to turn this around, and there is a lot of that in the upcoming generations. That’s what gives me hope.
