We can do this the hard way or the easy way.

So, the University of North Carolina opened, and James Madison University (much closer to home for me) opened and both of them decided after a week, or even less, to close due to the increase of cases of Covid-19 and the immanent and obviously predictable spread of the pandemic and its death to their staffs and their communities.   I commented on this in a letter to my local news:

I was heartened to see that JMU students were concerned about the health of the greater Harrisonburg community.   If only the administration of the university were as empathetic and intelligent as the students, we wouldn’t have to learn the hard way that it is too early in the course of this pandemic to reopen the school.  As G. W. F. Hegel 1770 – 1856 said:  "What experience and history teach us is this - that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it." 

Apparently, the hard way is the only way.

Now, perhaps because Trump wants it, the Big Ten conference (14 teams) is going to play football.  The chancellors and presidents have made their implicit decisions.

“Yes, we know that this will kill people, but hey; you know, money.”

Two letters to editors

To   The Daily News Record, Harrisonburg, Virginia:

I was heartened to see that James Madison University students were concerned about the health of the greater Harrisonburg community.  If only the administration of the university were as empathetic and intelligent as the students, we wouldn’t have to learn the hard way that it is too early in the course of this pandemic to reopen the school.  As G. W. F. Hegel 1770 – 1856 said:  "What experience and history teach us is this - that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it." 

Apparently, the hard way is the only way.

         [The University closed down after less that a week of in-person classes]

To The Washington  Post, Washington, DC

Re:  What I learned when the contact tracers CAME for me.  Dispatch from South                 Korea:

I think that the Washington Post needs an ombudsman or at the least much better editors, (I refer to the “Dispatch for South Korea” article of Sept 3).  The headline: “When the contact tracers came for me" (emphasis added), was yellow journalism at its worst.  What?  Are you guys trying to compete with the Globe and Enquirer now?  Your use of an infamous phrase from the depths of fascist Nazism was completely out of synch with the rest of the article.  Click bait isn’t restricted to the internet; your Headline editor is doing the same thing to your newspaper.  Stop it.