Not sure where to put this, but an enjoyable column by a St. Louis newspaper treasure, Bill McClellan. He’s retired but still writes a Sunday column, most of the time. He’s fighting cancer so some weeks he’s busy with that and doesn’t write.
Bill Gates is looking over my shoulder as I type this. I let him chip me this past Monday when I got a vaccine shot. I acted out of fear. The media had convinced me that COVID-19 is real. I mean, a serious threat, and not just a variant of the flu.
That may or may not be true. We live in a post-fact world. We no longer have to be tethered to reality. It is our newest freedom.
So forgive me if I have latched onto the theory that the media blew the virus way out of proportion and created the resultant chaos. It does wonders for my self-esteem. I have worked in the media for nearly half a century, and I never thought we were capable of pulling off something of this magnitude. We were, I thought, generally well-intentioned, but inept. We were the fairly smart kids who didn’t have the grades to get into law school, let alone med school. We weren’t talented enough to write novels or screenplays. We settled into the media. I fell into newspapers, which was closer to a trade than a profession, but it had its good points. It tolerated eccentrics, and as Jimmy Breslin once wrote, nobody died of thirst.
I remember getting a call years ago from a woman who was angry that we had run a story about a UFO. This whole thing about aliens from other planets is just part of your campaign to make us think God does not exist, she said.
I told her the news editor who chose to run that story was a friend of mine. We had gone on a float trip a few weeks earlier. We camped on a gravel bar. We both were over-served — no blame to be assigned — and the news editor thought he saw something strange in the sky. I told the woman that for the next few weeks, she should expect to see more stories about flying saucers.
That is a true story. I don’t mean to trigger anybody with an assertion about truth. I only mention it because that is the journalistic world I once knew. But over the years, while I have not been paying attention, we got smarter. We became capable of pulling off this giant hoax. We fooled the entire world. We even fooled Saudi Arabia, which not only dislikes journalists, but dismembers them.
At any rate, I got my shot — the first of two — Monday morning. That means I was in the first batch of TNEs — totally non-essentials — to get the vaccine in St. Louis County. I qualified only because of my age. I had been dutiful. I had made all the appropriate requests. My oncologist is at Siteman Cancer Center, which means Barnes. My regular doctor is affiliated with Mercy. I am also in the VA system. Plus, my wife got us on the county health department waiting list.
None of that mattered. I got a call Sunday morning from a friend whose mother had just gotten a shot from the county. She sent me a link. I clicked on the link and was assigned a Monday afternoon appointment. I sent the link to another friend, but by the time he tried, no more appointments were available.
So who were these first TNEs to get the vaccine? I do not mean to denigrate anybody who was getting a shot Monday afternoon at the St. Louis County health department outpost on North Hanley Road, but they were not an impressive bunch. They had none of the swagger you see at a World Series or a Stanley Cup game. Those people always seem self-assured, special, connected. This first batch of TNEs just seemed old and slow and passive. We were divided into small groups and herded into rooms. Then one by one, we were ushered into a smaller room where a nurse administered the shot. Or maybe she was an employee of Microsoft. I didn’t ask to see any credentials.
A sheeple, is what many freedom-lovers might call me.
In their minds, I fell for the oldest trick in the book, letting a faux world pandemic scare me into letting a billionaire install a microchip in my arm.
The most remarkable thing about our times is this: Many people believe that. A story in Yahoo in July of last year said that 28% of the population — and 44% of Republicans — believed that Gates was going to implant microchips in the COVID-19 vaccine.
Could those numbers be accurate? Is Yahoo reliable? It does not matter. We have moved beyond the tyranny of facts.
Let’s say, though, that the freedom-lovers are onto something. Maybe Gates wants to get into our arms, and then into our minds.
In that case, my friends from Monday — the other TNEs — have to be among his prime targets. Because the rest of you, the young and computer-literate, are already a known product. If you spend any time at all on your so-called devices, Big Brother already knows everything about you. He knows what you click on. He knows what you search for. He knows your darkest fantasies. Seriously, he does.
Some of us old people have resisted. We’re pretty much off the grid. Our secret society — we know each other by our flip phones — might not be as exotic as QAnon, but it is comforting to belong to something in an untethered world. We are the people who believe the summit of technical advance was the remote control device for the television. At that point, it should have stopped.
And for some us, it pretty much did.
For instance, I am not on Facebook. I have never tweeted. I don’t text.
I am not a purist. I email. I occasionally Google. But the point is this — people who spend little time on their “devices” retain a modicum of privacy.
We are a dying breed. Literally. We are the old people who never got used to technology.
Is it a coincidence that COVID-19 strikes hardest at us, and that we feel the greatest urgency to get the vaccine?
Maybe Gates did plan it all. It might be worth noting that after the “nurse” gave me my shot, and I asked her how I would be notified to come in for my second, she said there was an “app” I could use on my phone. I asked, “A what?”
The look she gave me made clear she works for Microsoft.
