Celebrating 1 million deaths

 Somehow last night I was tired, and went to bed sometime between 9 and 10. That's actually the ideal, for someone who would get up at 6 or certainly by 7. In fact, if I were living an ideal life, it would be perfect. 

Yes I plan to be a busker as my retirement career, but I don't plan to do this late-night stuff some buskers swear by. Yes I'm sure the tips are better late at night in Waikiki, but I won't need that much money to get by day to day, and I'll take less tips and playing for little kids and entranced Japanese tourists any day. I'll leave the night scene in "Waiks" with the break dancers, people selling LED light geegaws, and nervous undercurrents alone.

I woke up at 6AM, went back to sleep and had one of my occasional horrible dreams where scummy, low-class, street type people essentially move into my place and I can't displace them. It was a relief waking up again at 9. 

I'm not against the class system, not by a long shot. I'm just against the clumsy application of the class system, "social surgery" applied with a hatchet instead of a scalpel. Here on the mainland the classes are determined by gross measurements like how expensive a car you drive, what's in your bank account, and so on. There are a few places where it's been less crude and more properly applied. 

One example is old New Orleans, where it wasn't just a literal black-and-white skin color thing, but where one's education and background mattered and a single educated Creole Of Color was worth any number of low-class whites and would take care, sensibly, from being anywhere near same. 

Another example is Asia and the example I've seen up close is in Hawaii, where there are people who are obviously not trash, but may have barely two nickels to rub together. Regardless of her snobbishness, my older sister really is well-read and educated, yet she was very poor for a while. I was, of course, but looking back, the rather decent English I inherited from my father and my ideas of fun - read books or poking around at the beach - were a universe away from those of the actual white underclass, whose tastes run more to getting drunk/high, doing their own tattoos, and fighting. 

In Asian culture you can be poor as hell but if you excel in something decent like writing, music, culture of some sort, that's what matters. If I can become competent on the shakuhachi, no one's going to ask what's in my bank account. That's not how the greater part of the world, Asia and Asia-adjacent, works. 

But for now I'm still in the US and what matters here is numbers. We seem to be celebrating 1 million deaths due to covid, and as the Reddit poster WernerHerzogWasRight says, 

"The NYT laments 1 MiL Covid deaths. Little does anyone care, we are forecast to have 100 mil cases and another whole million dead by December. Our government response: to stop paying for booster shots. We are expected to die for capitalism." 

So, 2 million deaths total, which is in line with a thing I read long ago now saying that for covid to be like the 1918 flu, we "need" to have 2 million deaths. No doubt we'll make it - we're a can-do nation. 

So, China, the world's leading superpower, is at least trying for a zero covid policy, probably because they've read "science books" or something and know the more cases, the more chances for variants. And the US has a "let it rip" policy. 

If there's one thing I can point to that's different between Asian cultures and our own, it's that in our own culture, it's survival of the fittest taken to the extreme and if you're weak due to being old, young, injured, etc. you're just supposed to die. It's why the US had a policy of making sure covid-positive workers got into nursing homes and the whole thing shut up like an incubator to kill off as many of the old people as possible. That a few working-class workers died was just a bonus. Also, the policy was to get covid-positive people into jails and prisons, let the whole thing incubate for a week or two, then let tons of prisoners out to further spread the disease. 

Asians in general dote on their kids and want them to do well in life, among whites it's "You'd better earn your keep and you're weak if you're not working full time by the time you're 14". Asians treasure their old people, while anyone reading this knows in the West the old are put into hellish "nursing" homes to be killed off. Which is the longer-lived, more successful culture, that invented everything? It's sure not the West.