Bear with me, please. This thread is about COVID-19.

We talk of the Greatest Generation. I see the tributes to the men & women who sacrificed & fought & died & I remember walking around the WWII Memorial in DC when it first opened with tears blurring my vision 1/12
I was a child of that generation. I grew up revering & rebelling, respecting & rejecting so much of what they represented. 2/
I don't do well with either blind adoration or broad vilification of any demographic group or gender or race or ethnicity or whatever way we choose to classify each other. 3/
I'm puzzled by the willingness to overlook the racism, sexism, homophobia, & overt paternalistic attitudes that permeated so much of society controlled by that greatest generation, while we hold the next, the boomers in such disdain 4/
The young men who fought & died in that next war of my youth were no less brave or noble for the errors of policy that sent then to bleed & die in the jungles. 5/
The voting patterns & political leanings & policies supported haven't reflected much difference either, but one group seems to be held less accountable for our current problems, perhaps justifiably by virtue of the size of those groups. I'm not certain. 6/
The remnants of that greatest generation and the leading edge of the boomer population are old. Many are infirm. Many of the veterans of those wars, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, are living out the remainder of their time in nursing homes & senior care facilities. 7/
Many others, the women, the ones who didn't go off to fight, are with them in these facilities.

And so I come to my concern about how we respect & value these people.
8/
1.3 million people live in our 15,600 nursing homes, according to the CDC.
USA Today reports, in an article published yesterday, 2300 facilities have outbreaks of COVID-19 & the reality is likely much worse, because of incomplete data available from 7 states, including Florida.9/
Over 3000 deaths have been reported to date.
There will certainly be many more.

Staff are often provided inadequate PPE, are overworked & underpaid, & many hold positions in a number of different facilities in a given area. Testing is often random & unavailable to workers.10/
These people are dying.

I see horrible postings by media personalities shrugging off these deaths as incidental to the greater concern about the economy or to the inconvenience of our current restrictions & I shudder. 11/
There's so much to be concerned about, so many challenges, so many deaths.
I only hope that attention is paid, not to glorified tributes to what came before or criticisms of what should have been, but to what is right & decent & human about how we see the value of our elderly.12/
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