Readers respond: Lessons learned after years of wrestling with COVID in NC

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Readers respond: Lessons learned from COVID

On Jan. 3 we ran an editorial with our list of lessons, revelations and reminders about what COVID has taught us in North Carolina. We asked readers to submit their own lessons. Some of those entries are below.

From reader Todd Arnold of Charlotte:

▪ Science means continuing to study and learn about something, adapting as you learn more information. The recommendations about COVID evolved as the scientists learned more about the virus and how it works.

▪ When they have to avoid public spaces, it is difficult for older, retired people to find ways to interact with other people. This contrasts with people who are isolated at home, but working - those people may not physically interact with others, but they still do so via electronic means such as zoom meetings, email, or instant messaging with their coworkers.

From reader Joe Swain of Carrboro:

▪ That we live in a global society — we depend on others for the functioning of our economy and others rely on us.

▪ That we’ll never see an end to COVID as long as it thrives in countries far away from us and keeps mutating over and over again.

▪ That we had better step up our game in dealing with global threats to humanity, or we’ll go down together.

From reader Gary Livingston of Charlotte:

▪ Lockdowns were not a cure-all.

▪ The president was going to end COVID then passed the buck to the states.

▪ Doctors,nurses and healthcare workers were frontline heroes until the vaccine mandates, then some lost their jobs.

▪ The National Education Association can influence changing CDC mask mandates and social distance policy in public schools.

▪ Charlotte public schools lost track of thousands of students.

From reader Tim Collie of Rock Hill, S.C.:

▪ The CDC and Biden administration are the masters of miscommunication.

A perversion of patriotism by Trump Republicans

The writer is first vice chair of the Brunswick County Democratic Party.

We, the American majority, who freely and fairly elected President Joe Biden, cannot rest easy. The choice between parties is now a choice between authoritarianism and democracy. On the anniversary of the attempted coup at the Capitol we must resolve to vote in the 2022 midterms to ensure that it doesn’t happen again.

Republican politicians call themselves patriots while trying to rig future elections. At the state level, they’re passing voter suppression laws and manipulating election procedures so that results can be decided by partisans. At the federal level, they repeatedly reject bills designed to protect Americans’ right to vote.

Some GOP leaders and candidates are perpetuating the myth of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election. Despite a complete lack of evidence, they persist with the lie to maintain favor with former-President Trump’s supporters. They are too craven to tell the truth: Trump lost because he was a divisive, incompetent president who cost hundreds of thousands of people their lives by tragically mishandling the pandemic.

The culmination of the Trump GOP’s perversion of patriotism was last year’s attempted coup. Insurrectionists, incited by Trump, attacked our Capitol and law enforcement, believing they were fighting for their country. In reality, they were fighting for a lie.

They were conned by an ex-president who cares only about lining his pockets and feeding his monstrous ego. Following the assault, Trump’s Republican cabal in Congress, including seven members from North Carolina, voted to overturn the election results. Later, all the N.C. Republicans in the U.S. House unanimously opposed legislation establishing a Jan. 6 commission.

Attacking the seat of our government and voting against the certification of legitimate electoral votes are not pedestrian — nor patriotic — acts.

They’re acts of treason. Jan. 6, 2021 was not an aberration; it was a dress rehearsal. Americans must vote in overwhelming numbers in every election to reject the perversion of patriotism embraced by Trump Republicans who prefer authoritarianism to democracy.

Shelley Allen, Holden Beach