Treatments, part II -- A defense of the Karens

 Well, sort of.

In the 20-teens the name "Karen" entered the American popular culture as a term of derision for a bitchy woman.  In the pop culture, Karen was a middle-aged white woman with a particular haircut (called  a "Karen Cut") always wanting to speak to the manager over some perceived slight: not enough ice in her drink or the not enough salad dressing or  the coffee is cold or something.  The point of the Karens is that they don't just complain, but go ballistic.  Maybe not screaming and shouting (though that sometimes is part of the package) but persistent and intimidating by their presumed status ("I can have you fired if you don't fix this.")

And of course there was a Karen Hierarchy.

During the racially charged days after George Floyd, there was a story about a white woman in NY who called the cops on a black man because he was birdwatching in Central Park.  She was inevitably called the "Central Park Karen, though she was far too young to be actually named "Karen" and had an age-cohort appropriate name of "Amy".

But the topic of today's post is the "mask Karens" or "Covid Karens" that came out in 2020.  

Actually, there were two groups of batshit crazies.  The Mask Karens (typically women) would blow their top and threaten to call the cops if a restaurant, school or any other public place was insufficiently careful about masking or distancing.  Then there was a group of (usually) men who would verbally and sometimes physically assault store employees who were trying to enforce the rules so they wouldn't fall under the wrath of the Karens.  For whatever reason, I never heard that there was a meme-friendly name for the anti-maskers.

But I think it's fair to say that the mask Karens was far larger than the other group.  I would venture that most reporters were in the Karen camp, or if not actually "Karens" due to some Karen-esque dispute over what a Karen is, for sure they were sympathetic to the Karens.  I would guess that most of the public health people were in the Karen camp, particularly mayors, governors and whoever else had the authority to shut down businesses if they misbehaved.  Some peckerwood yelling at a minimum-wage store clerk over a mask policy makes good TV, but what would you expect a Karen to put on her newscast?

Now, the Karens are annoying and frustrating and -- even before the rona -- make the world a less pleasant place.  But I want to share some insight to their behavior.  Not as a defense, but an explanation that can point to a way out from Karenism.

While the world was shut down from the rona, I ended up getting bladder cancer. Actually 2020 was a terrible year for everyone.  The rona and the lockdowns implemented in response destroyed countless lives.  But in June and July of 2020, I got a cancer diagnosis on top of all of that.  In previous posts I posted some statistics on bladder cancer, and that's why. 

Bladder cancer is not that rare -- it's actually the fourth most common cancer among men -- but it's not super common and it doesn't have a noisy advocacy group behind it so no one really knows about it.  People wear a pink ribbon to advertise their support for breast cancer research.  I guess bladder cancer survivors could wear a yellow ribbon, except Tony Orlando and Dawn already stole that for wanting people to come home (like soldiers).  Just kidding!

As it turns out, my cancer was stage-1 and I was eligible to begin immunotherapy treatments, which would go on for 18 months.  As I type this, I'd be in my next round of immunotherapy had I not hit that 18 month marker back in December, so I've been thinking about it a lot.  So I was lucky.  Not lucky enough to avoid the cancer, but lucky enough to keep all my body parts and avoid chemotherapy.  And it wasn't luck at all.  God was with me in the recovery, for sure.  He healed me.

Specific to the rona, bladder cancer  is a type of cancer that does not weaken the immune system.  Nor do the immunotherapy treatments make me more susceptible to catching a virus.  So the rona was irrelevant to my cancer and vice versa.  They were two unrelated woes I had to deal with at the same time.

However, what they did have in common was a sense of helplessness.  The rona goes where it will.  You have no idea when you'll come into contact with someone who will breath out just enough viruses for you to breath in and get infected.  That guy who looks sick?  He's actually down wind of you and no risk.  That healthy woman who just came from the gym ordering healthy food at the counter?   She's hours away from going down hard and is infecting everyone in this place by her very presence.  There's no way to tell.  Everyone is a potential threat.

Similarly with the cancer, there's no rhyme or reason to it.  Bladder cancer is more common among former smokers and people that work with chemicals.  That's it.  I do neither, so I can't say what caused the cancer.  But neither can I do anything to keep it from coming back.  That is, I can't quit smoking, because I don't smoke in the first place.  In another twist of fate, my neighbor growing up also contracted bladder cancer around the same time I did.  We both lived on farms so it's possible we were both exposed to some witch's brew of pesticide or fertilizer growing up.  But that would be incidental contact at best (we didn't work in a pesticide plant) and 30 years ago.  What can I do about it now?

So in both cases, there's a sense of helplessness and inevitable doom.  If I can't stop it, then it will happen.  That's pretty arrogant: assuming that I have such control over the situation.  But that's how it feels.

I did not handle the cancer diagnosis very well.  I cried like a baby for a month and a half until I had my followup test (called a TURBT) and the doctor was able to confirm they got all the cancer in the first TURBT and I was eligible for the BCG treatments.  But I never really got over it, in the sense that I can think about it objectively.  It's always a looming threat that it will come back and reading about it brings on anxiety after a certain point.  Almost like a medical journal article is a magic spell that will summon the cancer into existence.

The other thing that you feel is lonely.  You're not the only one with cancer, but you're the only one with your cancer, at your age, in your situation.  Perhaps with the more common cancers, like breast or prostate cancer, there is a good chance that you know a friend or family member who's been through it.  But I only knew my old neighbor but he had a much  more serious cancer and ended up dying.  It was sad.  And scary.

So what do you do?  You feel helpless so you try to find something that will help.  I mentioned that I was unable to read too much about the cancer before it would freak me out (maybe only 30 minutes every week).  But in the short time I was able to research the issue, I found that bladder cancer was one of the few cancers that had been researched in terms of exercise.  There are a lot of reasons to be skeptical about the relevance of that which I don't want to get into (stage, treatment required, etc) but the fact that the words "bladder cancer" appeared in a document is unique enough to pay attention to.

As it turns out, I was already exercising regularly when I got the diagnosis.  Of course, the papers didn't say I wouldn't get cancer if I exercised, only that there was a decreased chance that I would.  And in one of my subsequent 30 minute research sessions, I found information that exercise can slow the growth of cancer, so the fact that I was able to get on the BCG might be in part due to the exercise.

Regardless: exercise it is.  My current enthusiasm about exercise is mostly down to that.  I mentioned in previous posts that the actual benefit is pretty small.  Assuming that bladder cancer recurrence is similar to breast cancer recurrence (breast cancer is much more common and has that noisy advocacy group I mentioned above so it gets the lion's share of research), then the odds that my cancer will come back will decrease by about 20% or about 4 or 5 percentage points.  That means that if there were two groups of 100 people who'd survived bladder cancer, one group of which exercised and another group that didn't, 4 or 5 more people in the non-exercise group would see their cancer come back.

That's not a whole lot of improvement, but I'll take it.  It's all I have.  There's nothing else that I can do on my own (that is, not counting the treatments I went through).  And it's within my power to do it from a cost and convenience standpoint, so damn right I'm going to exercise and no bastard is going to stop me. And if I wear people out talking about it, then screw them.  It gives me a sense of control.

Now let me turn that statement around a little bit.  Say I'm in the 95% that sees no difference in outcome.  It still gave me a sense of control to exercise, and that made these two years bearable.  If it comes back, I'll cry like a baby again (and probably worse).  But for today -- the day I happen to be living in -- the sense of control is what keeps me going.  Without that sense of control, then it's just worry and dread and, really, what's the point of going on?

So back to the Karens.   There are two intersecting groups of people.  You have your left-leaning reporters and government bureaucrats that see a government solution to every problem -- including problems caused by the government.  And you have excitable health-conscious people looking for safety.  I don't mean hypochondriacs, but if we stick with the Karen stereotype, women typically are more sensitive to health matters than men on.  They want to keep themselves and their families healthy.  That's the "nurturing" aspect of womanhood.  It's a good thing.  It's not sexist to say it.

And these health conscious people are told day and night, on TV and in magazines and online, that a scary virus is coming to get them, and the government-trusting reporters tell them that the only thing they can do is trust the government and follow their guidelines.  Because if they don't they will get the virus and die. Or their family will die.  Or they will all die.  And there's nothing else they can do. There are no treatments.  No drugs.  No therapies.  No vaccines.  No technology.  All they can do is wear a mask and stay 72 inches away from the potential pathogen factory next to them.  Otherwise they will die and their dogs will starve to death because no one will be around to feed them.

Well, what would you do if you saw someone not wearing a mask?  Who's going to kill your grandmother and your dog because he's selfish? And you're already health conscious, but -- dammit -- it's just not enough.  Though maybe it was good enough to get you this far.  And this -- man! -- won't wear his damn mask and wants to put your kids -- your kids! -- in school where they can catch the rona and bring it home and kill everyone.

What would you do? It's life and death.

Well, maybe not "life and death".  As I write this, we're done with the Omicron Wave and so death statistics are fairly stable.  For the state of Texas, 5.4 million people have tested positive for coronavirus, of which 84 thousand have died.  Texas roughly has 30 million residents, so that means that roughly 18% have tested positive and 0.3% of the total population has died and 1.6% of all those that tested positive died.  Of course, far more than 18% contracted the virus.  My wife and I think we might have had it (maybe twice!) and never got tested.  So those percentages are a far-worse case estimate (it's likely the number of people who contracted the virus is 2-3x higher than the official total).

So standing in line at Starbucks next to an unmasked customer is hardly a death sentence.  Particularly since your typical Karen is a middle aged woman who can expect a very high recovery rate and an almost unmeasurably low fatality rate.  Same with the children we were constantly encouraged to worry about.

But is that obvious?  I just cannot overstate the constant barrage of rona warnings that a person would experience on a daily basis.  It's likely that every 10 or 20  minutes they'd be reminded about the dangers of the virus unless they had turned off all media, including TV, radio, newspapers, magazines,  the internet and -- above all else -- social media.  Even phone calls with family and friends was likely to bring up the dangers of the rona as Aunt Jane or Uncle Joe just tested positive and is asking for prayers.

And I suspect that the Karen crowd knew that masking and distancing and the rest of the dance did only so much.  Those NPIs moved the needle from "hopeless" to "mostly hopeless", but it was all they had.  And if you take that away from them, then screw you.

So let me step back to the cancer story.  All of my life, the word "cancer" was a death sentence.  Regardless of the type of cancer or severity.  Even today, people or situations are described as "cancer" if they are particularly evil. "You are a cancer on society" is not a term of endearment.  

So when I got diagnosed with cancer, the first thought was to get my affairs in order.  Even though I could see the statistics that my odds of survival were very good, it's still the Big C.  And even if I lived, I'd be living with cancer and the consequences of cancer.  And is that really living?

(To be clear, I never felt like committing suicide.  I'm just talking.)

So, again, getting control over cancer is clearly a big deal.  Even if it's a small amount of control.  

Cancer is clearly different from the rona.  I don't have to worry about someone's careless behavior causing me to get cancer.  But what if I did?  Let's say that second-hand smoke was as likely to cause cause cancer in the person exposed to it as the person smoking.  Now if I'm in a smoky bar, the people smoking are not just putting their own lives at risk, but mine as well?  Would I become a Karen?  Would I campaign to ban smoking in all public places?  Would I make smokers' lives miserable?

I'm not defending it. And I'm not saying I would do it.  But I can understand it.

One way to stop the Karens is to stop the fear. The idea that the media and government would collude to destroy the peace of a prosperous society is almost axiomatic. Around these parts, we call that "Tuesday". The media has an obvious bias towards disaster: no one tunes in to hear that everything is fine. And government bureaucrats need disaster to justify ever increasing budgets and manpower. And since time immemorial, the ruling class styled themselves as semi-divine beings who could prevent drought and ensure victory over all enemies. And when the drought came, they got a drafty feeling around the neck as their heads bounced down the temple steps. All of these people need crisis and pray for disaster every day to give their lives meaning. And in the obvious financial incentives of Big Pharma and Big Hospitals and the rona made a lot of people very powerful and very rich.

But they have to be stopped.   The fear is cancerous to society (ironic use of "cancerous" intended).  It does no one any good and locks people into often unproductive positions.  Accurate information about the severity of the virus was hard to come by.  The news would only highlight the worst-case data (if cases were up, they'd lead with cases. If hospitalizations were up, they'd lead with hospitalizations even if cases were down, and on and on).  Government figures were also hard to come by with confusing and inconsistent presentations of data.  But that's number one on my list of what-to-do-next-time.  Stop crying "Wolf!"

Another way would be to have effective therapeutics.   The reason why I put this in the section on Treatments is that I believe that if there was an effective treatment, the fear level would have gone down quite a bit.  Even if the treatment was only slightly effective.  Remember, I latched on to exercise as a regimen to keep cancer at bay and it would only help 4 or 5 people out of a hundred.  As I've mentioned before, and probably will mention again, the dismissal of things like Vitamin D and the outright banning of HCQ and Ivermectin makes absolutely no sense to me.  They are basically free.  Even if they help only a little, they still give people a sense of control.

Does that mean that HCQ is a placebo that we give the proles to shut them up?  Not at all.  But if it helps at least a little and doesn't cause any harm, then why not?  What else do you have?  People have to live their lives.  And if it doesn't help, you'd better be testing other things that might.  The rona might be a new virus, but viruses aren't new.  Get all the other remedies out and start testing them out.  On a huge scale.  Like on state picks Ivermectin and another state picks high dose vitamins and another state picks chicken soup and another state picks hydrotherapy.  Then after a month you see how things go.  Society doesn't work until people think they can recover from the virus.

And if you don't have an effective antiviral, quit fucking around and get one.

Finally, the Karens may never be mollified.  Society is pulling apart and at some point there may be separate-but-equal coffee shops, gyms and bars for the Karen and anti-Karen sets.  Self-selected, to be sure.  But that's probably inevitable.  Shutting down a non-Karen establishment because it doesn't cater to the Karen culture doesn't make for a healthy society.  That just divides people for the greater benefit of the government and media types I mentioned above. Around here we call that "Wednesday".

The Karens will always be with us.  It's a rush to save the world one manager at a time.  They always were with us, society just didn't hang a name on them until about ten years ago.  But they are defanged when their vision of crisis is not shared by the community around them.  The louder they shout the more they are mocked.  It's time we stopped listening to them.