To My Bubble: A Variety Of Thoughts

Greetings to everybody!

I was reading my daily dose of—what I call—Actual News, when it struck me that those in my bubble might be interested in a lot of these ‘stories’.  Big question (which I must address very briefly): what is my ‘bubble’, and won’t everyone in my bubble also be reading my daily dose of actual news?

Early last year, they would not have, because I started subscribing to the New York Times only after the President started denigrating them, along with other news sources.  My innermost Bubble, at that time therefore, resided within the group of my friends who did not read the newspapers, but got its news, like me, from Fb!!!  I know; that’s terrible.  That was terrible.  Now my bubble has started reading the actual news.  So it’s a slightly different bubble.

And then, the New York Times began to make its COVID-related news available for free to anyone.  This was a great step, I think.  I haven’t aggressively worked at disseminating the COVID articles; linking to them, etc.  Today’s general information article is excellent reading, but I am going to discuss the points that interest me right here, if you’re either too busy or too lazy to read it yourself.  (The paper NYT is intimidating, and a burden on the landfills.  The digital version is much smaller, and has wonderful content.  I apologize if the link I provided has some tag in it related to me, specifically, and enables the NYT to link you to me.  I wouldn’t put it past them, whoever they are, the people to whom the NYT has outsourced their digital intelligence operation, and you just know there is such a group.)

Apparently, experts are pushing Get Out suggestions.  After having supported Stay At Home for several months, it appears (according to some people; you’ll have to read the article to learn who) that—under certain circumstances—it is a good idea to go out of doors:
* The risk is small, provided you’re not in a crowd.  If your neighborhood has very few people outside, it might be an excellent risk (very small probability of getting infected) to go outside to just walk around the block.  You must wear a mask.  Get your sister-in-law to make you one, especially if she happens to belong to a group that makes hundreds of masks to give away free.  My wife has several older friends who are staying home quite aggressively (i.e., with great determination,) and one of whom lives alone, and is naturally feeling stir crazy.  She decided to have a distancing get together on the concrete seats of our city band shell.  I went along; we brought our own lunches from home (actually, we got our sandwiches from a neighborhood deli that does take-out), sat one bench away from each other, and had a great old time for about an hour.  Outdoors, the air blows any virus-laden droplets away, and they presumably end up on the ground.  We put our wrappers back in the bag we brought the food in.  When you get home, you must quickly wash your hands and your masks—twenty seconds at the sink—and you’re safe again.  The article also reminds us that you need to clean your doorknob; both before you leave the house, and after you return.
* Meeting outdoors might be a solution for all sorts of meetings, provided everybody doesn’t rush to do it all at once.  In fact, my wife, who is (among other things) the zoning manager for her county, meets citizens who want zoning permits signed, etc, outdoors at a picnic table.  Interesting, huh?  She goes to the meeting armed with a little sterilizing bottle, with which she cleans the pen she takes, for signatures, and she wears a mask.  The citizens she meets with have been very good about wearing masks, she said in her first couple of days at work; maybe standards have fallen off.  She herself, of course, wears a mask.  A complete professional, is my wife.  Ahem.
* Some cities, we are told, are closing down certain streets, to make it safer for people to be outdoors.  Cafes can expand distanced outdoor seating, for instance.  Pennsylvanians love to get drunk at bars; I wonder whether they might take to distanced drunkenness, if the Governor advises it.

Keep your common-sense radar on.  Going outdoors is all well and good, but there’s always your witless neighbors who might engage in risky behavior around you.  The breeze can only do its thing in keeping you safe if you take distancing seriously when you’re outdoors.

Education.  It is beginning to look as though the Fall Semester is going to be most of a bust, at colleges and universities.  I want to—quite hesitantly, but sort of defiantly—put forward the suggestion that under certain circumstances, classes could be conducted out of doors.  Let me explain.  (This has nothing to do with the article, per se.)
* I think—and I’m not an expert in education, education administration, or public policy, and I defer to their judgement, though I’m convinced that people who consider themselves experts in those areas are not much of experts either—that, at least briefly, that the curriculum has to be changed: some topics taken out, other topics put in.  It is better, temporarily, to have a little educational activity at this time than no educational activity at all.  Some kids (using the term broadly) submit to classes reluctantly, and would take a hiatus as an excuse for jettisoning all the progress that teachers have made in the days preceding the hiatus.  These are the fellows who come back from the summer with their minds a (true or pretend) perfect blank.  This is an enormous opportunity to bring these kids back into the fold, even temporarily.  Some of these kids might absorb these Shutdown-time educational experiences much better than they have ever absorbed anything.
* If it is decided to bring students in, even in small groups, into a highly-supervised, spaced-apart, brief, meeting with the teacher, they may actually absorb a great deal, as long as the teacher does not try to force-feed them a ton of material.  The usual repetition can’t be done, and some of us know just how much repetition and drill is required to enable students to perform at the levels we used to perform in our day.  And one of the greatest techniques we used in mathematics—group work—will be impossible.
* A class of twenty, say, would need to be split up into four classes of five, meeting outside in a corner of a stadium, on the bleachers, for anything from half an hour, for young kids, spaced widely apart, to an hour, for college kids, also spaced widely apart.  Necessarily, up to a quarter of the time could be taken up with talking them down, and discussing the rules, and relaxing them.  Then, five to ten minutes of instructions could follow.  Then more relaxing pabulum, a little reflection on the material.  Then five minutes of drill, perhaps?  Applications?  That would end the session for very young students; for college kids, another cycle could take place.
* Larger groups of college kids can be taught in the corner of the stadium, I'd say up to ten.  I don’t know whether modern college kids can be relied upon to stay away from each other when instructed to do so; I would imagine that they cannot.  A threat that offenders would not be invited back might help.
* Living in dorms would be almost impossible—I could be wrong, but if a desperate Administration were to try this, they would have to put one kid per room, and heavily supervise the living conditions; e.g. keep them out of their dorms until very late at night, with distanced activities the entire time, only one person per toilet at a time, etc etc.  Then, around midnight, they can be sent into the dorms, and the hallways patrolled, to prevent impromptu parties, etc.  It would be a nightmare, especially with the culture of disobedience to authority that obtains today in colleges.

More Energy from Renewable Sources.  This year, apparently, the ratio of renewable energy / coal energy has passed the halfway mark.  One of these days, the renewable/non-renewable will also pass the halfway point, and we will all die of happiness—at least those in my bubble will.

Bookstores.  The article reminds us that, while bookstores were recognized as places to buy the mythical objects called Books, they have also been places where people met and socialized.  Some people have found that a large proportion of their closest friends were actually bookstore employees and owners!  (Is this sad, or is this great?)  With the shutdown, little, independently-owned bookstores have experienced unbelievable suffering, we are told.  The article advocates that if you’re ordering digital reading-materials, order through your local bookstore.  They may even order the NYT for you, incidentally.

All this has made me wonder what constitutes anyone’s bubble, really.  We have an intuitive understanding of the term, based on how it has been used in the media.  Primarily, I think, it is the set of people who influence me.  Secondarily, it could be the people whom I influence.  There could be a small overlap—or a quite large overlap—between the two groups.

Obviously, the second group could be a lot larger for a blogger, simply because not all of those who read the blog can influence the blogger, except in the—wonderful—case where all the readers make comments!  Interestingly, not all of those in my innermost bubble are liberals or democrats.  I have family members who are conservatives, and family members who have friends who are conservatives, whom we meet on a regular basis.  Sometimes we avoid talking politics; we usually avoid talking party politics, which is not the same thing.

Conservatives, and Republicans, and die-hard supporters of the President, are not all the same thing.  I read increasingly frequently in the news, that long-time republicans, many of whom are still republicans, and some of them the dreaded RINOs—those accused of being Republicans In Name Only by doctrinaire conservatives, on Fox News, or Rush Limbaugh, or other conservative outlets—that they are repelled and disgusted with the tweets and the thoughts emanating from the administration, the White House, the Senate, and so on.  Many of them are those who have worked in various branches of the government under Democrat administrations.  These folks, though they continue to think of themselves as Republicans, or at least conservatives, decidedly do not fall into the Trump Camp.  Many of them, moreover, are in my bubble, in the sense that some of the things they say actually do influence me.

Er.  I might have had something to say about these bubbles, but . . . I have forgotten what.

So, see you later, as the saying goes!


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