Bill Maher: Stop Surrendering To Covid Caution
The past few editions of IDLM have been focussed on what happens next in sports: Do fans return to the arenas and stadia after Covid-19? Will salary caps tumble with gate receipts? Will the athletes themselves agree to play without a proven vaccine?
The fear that’s been created by politicians and media over the pandemic has been epic. We see police arresting parents with their kids at the park or mayors closing beaches to enforce ever more stringent rules for defeating Covid. It’s a reminder that voters don’t really vote their pocket books. In this age of Karens, they vote their fear.
Their fear of losing their life. Their fear of losing their jobs. Their fear of losing their homes. And, increasingly, their fear go being seen as opposing the “accepted wisdom”.
Is there a role for the sports world as fearful politicians and panic-pushing media slowly come around to the idea that wrecking society is a greater calamity than the remnants of Covid?
IDLM believes sports can serve a beneficial purpose if it educates the population to the Covid realties that have largely been ignored by equivocating politicians and cable-news talking heads. Namely, locking up you and your kids and Grandma in your condo is not the solution to ending this nightmare we’ve (largely) imposed on ourselves.
We’ve only delayed the inevitable exposure for the shut-ins— most of whom, we’ve learned, would have been asymptomatic or experienced a mild case of Covid if we’d emulated Sweden by staying open. Yes, some people with underlying conditions or who are aged will still become very sick. Some will die if we don’t use the quarantine on them.
As we said here, however, the morbidity from many other medical conditions is now equal, if not superior to Covid. Which brings us to an unlikely ally in this argument.
Normally I find cable news host Bill Maher a bit much. He can be arch and unbearably smug. George Carlin without the integrity. But he does present people from both sides of the argument . Here’s my favourite, where Ann Coulter predicted six months out that Trump would be president, much to the amusement of Maher’s audience.
His role seems to now be the guy to talk liberals and their radical pals off the ledge. He’s repeatedly begging them to nominate a reasonable person, because in Bill’s universe, anything between Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders should walk over Trump in November.
In the latest instalment of his The New Rules, however, Maher fills the gap left open by the people we trust to tell us the truth. In it, Maher informs the sheeple in his orbit that you can’t cure Covid by hiding from it. The way to end the tyranny of the virus (and the attendant quarantines) is to confront it with our immune systems, he says.
He asks, how do you think so many people have tested positive for Covid and either not known they had it or experienced mild symptoms? Our immune systems. They protect us. Erecting plastic barriers, closing restaurants and keeping kids out of school is no way to go through life, Maher says. Acting like hermits won’t help you out-run this pandemic or others to come where there’s no immediate vaccine.
Yes, protect the vulnerable, whom the virus has been so kind as to point out to us. Yes, observe good hygiene. But get real about what you’ve faced before and will face again. Maher points to his dogs who roll in all manner of foul elements and whom he then pets or even allows to lick his face. What saves him— and will save most of us— is our immune system.
As the Irish liked to say, everyone needs to eat a pound of dirt to gan immunity. Maher implies that it might be worth six months of super-scrubbing bathrooms, sanitizing shopping carts and chloroxing the kids’ toys for a population who’ve been duped by their leaders.
On the subject of leadership, ask yourself this: Remember when, in deference to AIDS, we made everyone with a spatter of blood leave a sports event? How many cases of AIDS did that prevent? Virtually none. It was a balm for people till they understood that the greater population wasn’t going to be infected if they weren’t shooting up drugs or engaging in unsafe sex.
‘Which is where sports comes in. Nothing would demonstrate better to the Karens out there that it’s safe to have a real life again than watching a hockey game or a tennis match or a football contest where guys and girls are sweating and breathing on each other. Where a drop of blood isn’t cause to halt the game. Where the participants embrace at game’s end in camaraderie.
There is a way to make sports safe for the participants. There's also a way to reassure fans that going to Jurassic Park in Toronto for a Raptors game isn’t a death sentence. We need the people involved in sports to understand the civic trust they can exercise in underlining Maher’s message. We live in an unsafe world. We will have other pandemics, perhaps worse.
But if we surrender to fear we might as well hand the keys to the microbial world and say, Here, you run the place.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). He’s also a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, he is also the best-selling author of Cap In Hand which is available on BruceDowbigginBooks.ca