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Cousin Sherry on the Phone

Bill Tope

    I had an intriguing telephone conversation tonight with my Cousin Sherry, who lives up north, near Chicago. She updated me on her children, her grandchildren, her job prospects and a host of other personal and rather prosaic matters. My part of the conversation, as usual, was to say “umm,” “really?” and to offer up an occasional “wow, that’s something!” More than one speaker is rather redundant when talking with Sherry. Finally, after considerable preliminaries, she got down to the nut of her conversation.
    “I am so tired of Black this, Black that, Black Lives Matter, all that shit!” she exclaimed with some vigor. “I just don’t get it.”
    “Well, I can understand some of what they mean,” I replied warily, anxious lest she explode into a vituperative tirade on why Black lives don’t in fact matter.
    “Hell, they gather into the streets in the city and shoot each other and spread COVID and threaten people; they think that Blacks are the only important people....” Her voice lowered to a whisper. “Did ever look at a black person, I mean really look at him? His face, his hands, his arms are so primative, sort of like monkeys or apes. And,” she went on, “they don’t speak: they grunt and mumble and snarl...”
    “I think what they’re saying,” I explained, is that all life matters, including Black life. “And do you really think that Blacks shooting each other is a major source of the coronavirus?” I asked skeptically.
    “They’re a large part of it. They don’t wear masks!”
    “Do your children, or your grandchildren, wear masks? Have they gotten vaccinations?”
    “No, but that’s their choice.”
    “It’s their choice whether to infect other people with a deadly virus?” I asked.
    “They’re not sick; they’re not infecting anyone. It’s free choice!” she said. “Besides, wearing masks doesn’t help. People get COVID from the ventilators they put on them in the hospital. My Friend Mary, a respiratory therapist, said they infect them with coronavirus, pronounce them dead and then scoop them into body bags like pizzas out of a hot oven!”
    “That doesn’t sound real,” I protested. But I could tell she was just getting warmed up.
    “Mary’s a respiratory therapist,” she repeated for effect. “And you’re not!”
    “That would come under the heading of anecdotal evidence,” I pointed out. “It’s effectively useless as a statistical norm.”
    “And vaccinations aren’t valid science, They just whipped up the vaccines in someone’s kitchen sink, practically overnight. It hadn’t been tested yet.
    “Well, would you prefer that they withhold the medicine till it’s proven, or would you rather they administer innoculations on an emergency basis? After all, Sherry, four thousand people were dying a day.”
    “Those were old people, with underlying conditions, right on the precipice of dying. They counted every death as COVID-related because they’d make more money if it was coronavirus.”
    “Are you serious?” I asked.
    “I heard it on Fox News and it was on the internet too, so it had to be true.”
    “Well, I don’t know...”
    “I’ll tell you who’s the real villain in this. It’s that damn Fauci! He lies. He has stock in Pfizer and Moderna and told everyone not to wear masks and he was on the committee to elect Biden, that sonofabitch!” I sighed, shook my head.
    “Anything else on your mind?” I asked wearily.
    “Yes!” she snapped. “Those damn Mexicans are infesting the United States. They’re coming across Biden’s open border in caravans and they’ve all got coronavirus and none of them wear masks. They squirrel away in the cities like rats and you can never find them, unless they’re taking away jobs from an American worker.”
    “I thought you said that it’s not helpful to wear a mask...”
    “But, they’re not citizens,” she pointed out.
    “But that’s beside the...”
    “I’d rather vaccinate my dog that vaccinate a damn alien!” she exclaimed, then abruptly the line went dead. All that information, and it had taken only two hours.

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