The American zeitgeist concerning the Covid pandemic has, from the outset, flirted with a school of morality I have long termed “Sucks to Be You” Ethics. Back in March of 2020, I wrote about how President Trump was convinced that he had Covid confined to one arriving cruise ship, and in a real-life application of “Lifeboat Ethics,” he decided to… Read more »
Two and a half years after all our lives were upended by Covid-19 it is critical that we look forward and ask ourselves, “How will America respond to the next pandemic?” Because we “failed the math part of exam” so badly with Covid-19, I fear that we will do much worse the next time out. The anti-math contingent of Americans… Read more »
We await the Supreme Court likely undoing decades of jurisprudence on the topic of women’s reproductive rights and we simultaneously see new state-by-state battles over LGBTQ+ rights. It has become obvious to me that our culture’s long insistence on binary choices on morality issues does not help us navigate Mother Nature’s (and democracy’s) love of continuum and complexity. Even among… Read more »
The recent controversy over a leaked Supreme Court opinion perhaps overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade abortion decision highlights how even Supreme Court justices, when blinded by sectarian religious fervor, can get Ethics 101 wrong. In a pluralistic society, issues of public morality may overlap with issues of legal practice, but only in places like Taliban-controlled Afghanistan do judges make… Read more »
The old joke about life insurance is that the policyholders are betting that they are going to die, while the insurers are betting that they won’t, at least until the premiums and investment income pass break-even. One significant new social change emerging from this coronavirus pandemic is that the most conservative segment of the insurance industry’s base is refusing a… Read more »
Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds declared the Covid pandemic over in her state yesterday, saying the state’s feeble measures to contain the coronavirus and address hospital needs are “no longer feasible or necessary.” Meanwhile, many Iowa hospitals remained stretched to the max, relying on “traveler” staff and “locums” to maintain services. Reynolds has no apparent plans for preparing for any future… Read more »
Here is the curious thing: When it comes to the embrace of modern medical care. including, or especially vaccinations, there has historically been little difference between how members of conservative Christian denominations and their “mainstream” Christian or their secular neighbors choose treatment modalities — until Covid-19. Some conservative religious types have long championed “natural health” methods rather than conventional medicine…. Read more »
It was just two weeks ago that I posted about the famed “Florida Man” meme, the (almost always) men who are absolutely sure that they are right when they are embarking on some dangerous action that is really wrong. And then, just this past week, we took guests to southwest Florida’s Myakka River State Park, where you can walk through… Read more »
Ever since I transitioned from Iowa-based snowbird to full-time Floridian, news accounts of the storied “Florida Man” now show up regularly in my news feed. To find your own “Florida Man doppelganger,” you simply Google “Florida Man” in quotes, followed by your birth month and day, and then see what news headline comes up. My search yielded this: “Florida man,… Read more »
Note: This post was previously published at the Iowa blog Bleeding Heartland. Before a planned international trip for a humanitarian non-governmental organization a few years ago, I received cholera and typhoid vaccinations as part of a set of several jabs administered by Iowa’s Polk County Health Department. Despite some transient ill effects, I survived to tell the tale, one more… Read more »