Back in mid-June I did a post entitled, And What To My Wondering Eyes Did Appear…
That’s a line from the poem ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas.
Why was I quoting a Christmas poem in June?
Because I was watching the PBS NewsHour and saw this:
Something I hadn’t seen in many, many months:
NewsHour host Judy Woodruff had been joined by guests in the studio.
Her two guests were sitting across the desk, no masks, doing their interview face-to-face.
No talking from their home offices or living rooms on sometimes-less-than-reliable equipment.
These two guests were live and in-person!
In my post I said,
I was transfixed.
It was, I realized, a real, true sign that we are on the road to recovery.
It looked so normal.
Happy days were here again!
Fast forward six months, to Monday, December 20.
‘Twas a few nights before Christmas.
On that evening’s PBS NewsHour came this:
“…COVID and the Omicron variant…to join us remotely.”
No more guests in the studio.
No more face-to-face.
I’d heard, read and seen endless stories like this:
But this…
What I was seeing on the NewsHour was my crash and burn moment.
We’ve taken a monstrous step back.
Back to the bad old days.
And the predictions are worse than bad – they’re dire:
And yet millions of people are acting as if “Omicron” is just a word, and “Delta” is just a memory:
On December 18, 2021 on CBS News’ Face the Nation, Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, said,
“People are going, ‘I’m so sick of hearing this,’ and I am, too. But the virus is not sick of us, and it is still out there looking for us…”
Here’s why it is this way:
I Hate Houseguests 