Don's Tuesday Column

              THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson  Red Bluff Daily News   4/07/2020

   Avoid networks; column history, record

Local news media sources are, during the Chinese Communist Party Wuhan Coronavirus influenza (Wu-flu, for short), proving their utility and need beyond anything readers, viewers and residents could have imagined. This at a time when national broadcast news segments—being New York-centric to the near-exclusion of “flyover country,” as well as obsessively preoccupied with finding real or imagined faults and contradictions in President Trump’s words—have become quite dispensable. We can discern agenda-driven, anti-Trump slanted drivel.

If another deep blue, Democrat-dominated urban metropolis like Detroit or New Orleans racks up noticeable Wu-flu infections and fatalities—often due to having the packed-together, elevator-serviced, mass transit-dependent lifestyle the rest of us are supposed to emulate—you’ll be fed their doom and gloom, too. Seriously, if you are anxious or depressed, stop watching national news, or at least mute it, read the closed captions, and you’ll realize there’s little of relevance to your life.

Past Daily News issues get read, often well after the fact. In this case they provide sad-but-hopeful vignettes of what we have lost—or given up, as the case may be—and will in time recover. Headlines from Tuesday, Feb. 11: Thousands attend wine, food and art festival; Chocolate Fantasia hosted downtown; Barrel race added to annual Cattle Days event; 4-H hosts Fun Night fundraiser; Evergreen Elementary kindergarten registration; Sunrise Rotary to host Surf and Turf Dinner; Spartans compete…Corning girls grab big victory.

Those and most other community events are not typically on my must-see or -attend list, given as I am to a social-distancing lifestyle of many years’ duration; however, the vicarious enjoyment of what “takes a village” to create is meaningful. I don’t want my situation, as a 69-year old with underlying lung issues, to be a cause for shutting down the lifeblood of our community. Together with my similarly situated wife, we are perfectly willing to be responsible for our own health and Wu-flu avoidance habits, if it will allow the rest of our beloved Tehama County to resume the gatherings that define us all.

If my 7-year younger sister, an emergency room registered nurse, or RN, had lived past last May, and survived the combination of a heart attack and stroke that came on top of her adult diabetes, she would likely be in her Northern Indiana hospital’s response to local Wu-flu cases. Would that we lived closer and had more daily sharing of our lives; I might have known more of what she had accomplished, in getting her certification, and actually did every shift.

I know she routinely worked the holidays and had their family Thanksgiving and Christmas get togethers a week later. Fortunately, she was fulfilled in her position, while her devoted husband and extended family surely had deep appreciation of her calling.

It is to the benefit of readers to have an RN, Mr. Allan Stellar, committed to writing a column. He will undoubtedly find that getting to write every week translates to having to carve out the hours required to submit his thoughts, every week, no matter the work or family demands. Located on the left side of the page seems appropriate; his observations fall reliably on the left side of the political spectrum.

Newer readers who’ve started since this column began in 2005, might benefit from a short history: During the 2004 presidential campaign, local Republicans asked then-editor Michael Griffin if the Opinion page might be diversified with some columns from a conservative perspective. Dominant were those opposed to President George Bush and the Iraq War. The views of what was then, as now, a 60+ percent Republican super majority seemed absent.

After the election, in early 2005, Mr. Griffin put out an invitation to local Republicans, which came to me, as I had had letters and opinion pieces published over the years in the Daily News, the Redding and Chico papers, and the Sacramento Bee. I particularly recall my forceful refutation of the lunatic leftist narrative that President Bush had culpability for the 9/11/2001 Islamic terrorist attacks. How very relevant and ironic that this column can now bring that record to current attempts to impute malign motives and incompetent deeds to another Republican President, Donald J. Trump, over the national Wu-flu outbreak.

Over nearly 20 years, I have never found the need for retraction based on facts or erroneous analysis. On the contrary, I can pick up a column from last week, last month or ten years ago and find no cause for correction. Over the years, that record of accuracy derived from the habit of waiting until events had settled and debates had been vetted; I was reticent to weigh in prematurely and, perhaps, in error.

This column will no longer hesitate to opine on, and provide the facts of, the issues of the previous week; if anything turns out to be off-base, you will find out, as soon as I know. For instance, relying on the numbers provided by “ncov2019.live” I stated that the daily percentage increase of American infections and deaths was in the single digits. That was a middle of the day update which later did in fact become 15+ percent increases; let’s hope the “curve” does “flatten” and new infections and deaths become fewer than the previous day’s total.

It remains a certainty that, if the anti-malarial drug, HCQ for short, alone or together with another pharmaceutical, can treat the fatal and serious aspects of the Wu-flu, we will no longer need to restrict any of the legal activities of Americans. Let some of the mitigating habits continue: hand washing, home quarantine of the ill and testing of hot spot residents. Masks should be encouraged where and when indicated, medically speaking. By May, Americans must begin to resume a normal life and economy with mitigations. Without a thriving economy, there is no health care.

Unfortunately, both Mr. Stellar and Mr. Statham have written the falsehood that President Trump called “coronavirus a Democrat hoax.” Please have the integrity to admit your error. Your sources lie.