You know, I read the newspapers for today and yesterday. I know Governor Newsom is trying to manage the crisis in a state with some 35 million people -- a diverse state where there are three, concentrated megalopolises and areas west and east of the Sierra Nevada of low population density. The political hues are predictable in different congressional districts.
I know there has been resistance to mask precautions -- the news coming from places like Orange County, where the Trumpers are all in a snit about their "freedom".
I don't have the slightest idea of the specific mask requirements in the state or in this or that part of the state. I'm totally ignorant of the specific orders or their penalties. And I don't care if I remain ignorant of the specifics, because my personal practice now includes donning a mask even when there's a knock at my front door.
I was wearing masks in February, and enjoyed going out and about dressed up like a Clint Eastwood bank-robber, or like Dustin Hoffman in "Outbreak". It was fun, but I had a heightened sense of the risk given my age and conditions.
People in this country, given their presidential choice of 2016 and other collective decisions, seem to have a primitive idea of risk. They may have always been ignorant of the simple fact that the institution of government in whatever time or place or type is to reduce collective risk -- in public health, in military preparedness, in so many ways.
When Douglas MacArthur executed the Inchon Landing, it was a calculated risk based on a best hair-splitting guess about the tides, and he agonized over it through the landing operation. He couldn't afford the slightest mistake, jeopardizing the entire project and the lives of his men.
When you go to the BlackJack tables at the casino, you can either be a practiced card-counter or just a seat-of-the-pants risk-taker. If you aren't a complete fool, you limit the amount of cash you plan to put at risk, and embrace the possibility of losing all of it before you enter the casino. Or -- intending to count cards, you still know you could lose it all, but over the long run, you expect to lose some and win a bit more.
But, like the Inchon Landing, there are situations in which you cannot afford to take the slightest risk -- say -- of a single COVID particle entering your nostrils.