So … just when does the Hippocratic dictum, "First, do no harm" not apply? And when does doing harm to an entire country rank lower than the preservation of a single soul? And will the American people eventually show the spine once esteemed to be uniquely resolute and distinctively ramrod?
Recently, I was watching Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight, when he interviewed Dr. Robert Epstein of The American Institute For Behavioral Research & Technology, and, though Dr. Epstein is a highly respected expert in his field, it is his title of expert that brought me to one brain-wrinkling conclusion.
For the betterment of those served, most experts should be kept as far as possible from the tactical routines and "gray" regions of life. Experts are much too enamaured with, constrained by, and drawn to hard-edged and uncompromising "black and white" extremes, thus, lacking any warranted understanding of what lies along life's misery continuum.
During the Carlson interview, Dr. Epstein stressed that the way forward and out of our current COVID stupor is to test everyone. Not some, not most, but everyone inside America's sovereign reaches. And, for a brief moment, to tell you the truth, I intently listened for the punchline. Just imagine such a foolish notion, let alone its futile attempt.
Scientists ... experts ... largely are a class of society's "misfits," and, in fact, they are misfits of life, entirely. They live in Fantasy Land, secure within tightly controlled confines of the laboratory, slaved to unnatural disciplines of pristene defines. So, consider this …
For decades, these lab-coated mavens of manifest mysteries have spent tireless hours suspended in the presumptions of "exactness" ... not "almost" ... nor "close" ... or "nearly." They seek the illusive states of perfection, hence, their reliance upon that age-old "equal sign" (=).
That is the test-tube world of scientists and their cache of pursuits that resemble nothing of what the rest of us experience, day-in and day-out. Moreover, to these seekers of clear and unadulterated "blacks and whites," grays don't exist, because grays allow for far too much variance, too much margin for situational strays and sways out of control ... beyond the exactness harnessed by the equal signs of balanced equations and computer models and functions.
Ever since the first trail blazing on its Atlantic Coast, our country's perspective has been through lenses grayed by the appreciation for calculated risk, never paralyzed and fossilized by uncertainty.
We have never lived test tube existences, enslaved to the comforts of risk-free environs that smell of their latest swabbing of disinfectants, manipulating specimens, and running computer models and regressions as our only means to find and know our way.
Unlike scientists, the rest of us understand that, no matter how much effort is spent attempting to preserve against bad things happening to the good among us, bad things do and are sure to come.
But America has lost what always made us a unique people, frightened by the mere thought of hardship, chance, risk, failure, grays, and have turned to those who have known little failure without the option to "run [it], again, and again, and again", until the desired outcome is reached.
Now, under the advice of those experts, Americans cower inside their homes, social distancing from our very mirror reflections, fearing it, too, is COVID-positive, all in effort to remain untouched by the grays of the very thing we, as humans, are sure eventually to lose.
It's called ... life.
Milt Thomas grew up on a South-Georgia farm, graduated magna cum laude from the University of Georgia's Grady College of Journalism, and received his MBA from Emory University's Goizueta Business School. After a career as an executive with Cox Broadcasting, WSB-TV, Home Depot, and The Coca Cola Company, he is working to launch a new tech startup to rival social media and elevate the internet's entire quality experience. He has written and self-published his first book, "Black, Dumb and Barefoot...And Knocked Up By the Democrats." Milt makes his home in the Atlanta Metro. To read more of his reports — Click Here Now.
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