It may seem odd to have a landscape shot of the Great Smoky Mountains as a reference for an entry about people. I took the photo while on my recent trip to the woods and what a great set of woods the “Smokies” are. The trip was the first time out after spending months inside sheltered from a virus that our western culture had grown too arrogant to prepare for. For years we have failed to heed the warnings of some very smart people about our own unwillingness to prepare. We have languished in our own denial that anything like Covid-19 could exist even though we had ample enough evidence that these super bugs existed. We had even seen several different varieties of the same virus and we had seen the results of their deadly spread. But it hadn’t happened here. We made the decision that by not acting or doing much to adjust our priorities, our personal behavior, or our approach to disease prevention we would be untouched in our prosperous country. It may happen other places, poor places, already dangerous places, but it wouldn’t happen here. But it did. If you didn’t lose a friend or family member this time around, be thankful. Spending your time finding excuses in politics or false explanations won’t make any difference. Over 200,000 of our neighbors and millions more on this planet will have died by the time you read this. They weren’t all old. They weren’t all Republicans and surely weren’t all Democrats. They weren’t all from disadvantaged backgrounds. Corona viruses don’t see those things. The viruses only sense opportunities to grow and alter themselves and spread and they don’t argue about it. They do what they do and what they do is not good for what we do. So why the vista picture? Because looking at this scene without all the noise we have all been exposed to by so-called “experts”, and even worse, the politicians with little or no vision of the impact of their words or the press with only the absurd driven notion that their headlines mean anything but shit to the rest of us, it was easy to get clarity. A person doesn’t need a statistic or a count of the sick and the dying. A person doesn’t need a sensationalized politicized statement or conversation about what’s to blame or what to do about it. A person needs a moment to make the decision about what to do. I looked around the overlook where I had been standing for twenty minutes with my camera in hand. There were twelve people. Half of them were masked even though we couldn’t have been more outside. All were at least six feet away from each other. As people we can make decisions. It’s when we decide to waste air and anger debating why we make those decisions or we berate others because they make decisions on how to stay safe, that we lose just a touch of that thing that once made us so great in this county.