The Big Picture – 
By Glynn Wilson – 

It’s not clear whether the predominant view of the universe is that life imitates art, or if more people think art imitates life. There’s not been a Gallup poll on that, far as I know.

Chances are it’s both anyway. But for the sake of argument on this final Sunday in July in the year of the novel coronavirus, which has changed everything, let’s just settle on a compromise. Life and the news appear to be one very long re-run, with not much new under the sun except some new pictures of the sun from NASA. Are we living in a world grown out of science fiction? Or is science fiction anticipating reality in a world gone mad?

Most of what we are hearing on the radio, seeing on television, even on the movie channels, is mostly stuff we have already seen. Over, and over, and over again. We might as well get used to it, unless you are willing to get outside and plant your own garden and make a movie about it for Facebook.

Even professional baseball is gearing up for a shortened season with no fans in the stands, so the games will be animated with sophisticated applause and laugh tracks. For those growing up in the early days of television, when many shows were filmed with laugh tracks, this is probably going on without much notice. When you rely primarily on a passive medium of communication like TV, especially 24-hour news shows on CNN, it’s easy for millions of people to just get used to the status quo and go on pretending that they are seeing something new every minute of every day.

It might ultimately be safer for everybody if baseball would just go ahead and replay last season all over again on the tube. This should please Washington Nationals fans at least.

Football

This may be exactly what happens to football in the fall, since it seems impossible at this point to imagine how in the world you could have an actual football season when even most college and high school classes are going to be conducted online in the fall — whether Donald Trump likes it or not.

Is there anyone out there, other than a political pundit, who can explain to people why Trump is so intent on getting the schools to reopen, when it’s abundantly clear that he opposes everything they teach? He just wants to try to force the world to look normal to give himself a chance at reelection, which seems increasingly unlikely with each passing day.

Are there really still a few Republicans out there who continue to think COVID-19 is a hoax? Are there Democrats who really think this will all be over soon, so we can “get back to business as usual?”

If so I’ve got some soon to be under water swampland in Florida I would like to sell you for a premium. If you don’t “believe” in global warming and climate change, and have some extra money to bet that this too is a hoax, I will gladly take your money and do something useful with it, like planting more vegetables and feeding the poor, out of work musicians I know.

Very few new movies and shows have been made in the past few months, since hardly anyone has been working in Hollywood or anywhere else, so we will have to content ourselves for the foreseeable future with the reruns.

This is easy to do on public radio, as I heard last night on American Roots Radio. There are no live concerts to attend and record, so we just listen to good ones recorded in the past — with a new fund raising pitch on the front end.

Coronavirus News

Even most of the news stories and editorial columns I’m reading seem to be repeats of what has already been reported, maybe with a little update in the numbers of people dying from COVID-19.

For the record, as I write this on Sunday, Google is showing more than 16 million positive cases of the coronavirus disease worldwide, with more than 645,000 deaths. In the U.S., nearly 150,000 are dead and more than 4.3 million tested positive.

Just in the past week, our family suffered the loss of a cousin in an assisted living home in Birmingham, Alabama, Bobby Sweat. And my good friend Samuel Yana Davis — one of the biggest fans and most frequent commenters on this website and Facebook – died apparently of COVID-19, also in Birmingham.

If you are like me and there are moments every day when life in the era of the coronavirus seems untenable, you’ve got to find something useful to do for yourself and others. This is no time to allow the selfish gene to flourish. It is a time for widespread altruism, although I admit it’s hard to figure out how to do this without public events and personal interactions.

Save the World Through Gardening

My plan all along, even before the coronavirus came along, was to travel around in a camper van after having sold or trashed most of my material possessions and to find people who need help — especially farmers. All I need is a free campsite with power and water hookups and I will plant you an organic, heirloom seed garden.

Since I made the move to McDowell County, North Carolina, in May, that’s exactly what I’ve done. We are now harvesting and consuming Cherokee Purple heirloom tomatoes, organic green beans, collards and mustard greens, yellow, zucchini and butternut sqash, and soon we will have cucumbers, corn and broccoli.

And I must say, also for this historical record, that while I predicted the coolest spring and summer in the past 14 years due to the drop in carbon emissions of 17-26 percent worldwide in March, April and May, that may not hold true everywhere. It’s certainly not going to be true in Washington, D.C. and other big cities, which are heat islands all on their own, over and above the average surface temperatures across the planet. It won’t be true in the Deep South of Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana and the Panhandle of Florida.

But it is holding true for where I chose to be, with the right opportunity, in the rural mountains of Western North Carolina, where the traffic still appears to be quite light compared to Virginia and Maryland. It has been an exceptionally cool spring and summer, quite easy to take, with a little help from the regular summer rain clouds that seem to pass through this area with some regularity.

Hot August Nights

August will no doubt be one hot month, especially at night in the South. But then the fall weather pattern will begin after Labor Day and into September, so things will cool off again soon enough. Clearly I’m not the only one noticing these trends. The business sections of newspapers are filled with stories about rich people fleeing the cities and buying property in the mountains in sparsely populated, rural areas, along with stories about more people planting their own vegetable gardens than ever before.

We are planning the launch of a new website and social media accounts between now and November to focus on these things without all the partisan politics. Stay tuned.

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