The flu has gotten me

Back in 1957, when a major flu epidemic roared across the campus of Newark Rutgers and, no coincidence, throughout the United States, my editor at the school’s newspaper, where I was a lowly freshman cub reporter, assigned me a story. “Write about the flu,” he said. I sensed his desperation. Who but a real newbie, a novice, would take such a story? I wanted to write stories that were deep and impactful, not boring and vapid. Besides, all of us who read the paper were young and fit, healthy enough to withstand whatever that Asian flu might throw at us. How I wanted to refuse the task, but this would be my first piece in the paper. I couldn’t say no.

So I made a decision. I was going to do the article in the form of a poem.  And, surprisingly to me, it was a hit! I have great regrets that I cannot share it with you now. My friends at Google must have decided not to archive it, and I switched majors and went for music instead of journalism, so “The Flu Is Coming” exists nowhere except in the recesses of my mind. That’s a bad place! I’ve forgotten most of it. After all, that was almost 70 years ago.

So, please bear with me for snippets, and then I’ll link that with my Opinions!

The flu is coming was the word,
In every ear these words were heard,
A typical victim was Miss Myrna F,
To flu warnings she was totally deaf.
Until a tiny bug flew into her mouth with haste,
And multiplied without a moment’s waste,

The rest is in the totally-cannot-remember category except for the very last line:

Ah yes, the flu has gotten me!

And here I am, several flus later, and yet again the flu has gotten me. This has been a week of misery.  Bad enough to send me off to the doctor, medicated to the gills, suffering from the loss of a commodity that I never lose, my appetite. It’s nice to know my children and grandchildren care so much and that my husband is a tender caregiver. But I’m always cold, coughing the nights and days away and praying to swiftly dispense with this horror, for which I was dutifully vaccinated in September. Not very helpful, I’m sad to say. I even missed a contributor luncheon for this newspaper’s crew in an upscale Teaneck place. That hurt!

So, bound to my bed and blankets, I realized I couldn’t do what I always enjoy the most, sick or well, which is to read obsessively, junk or quality stuff, even ketchup labels. My New York Times was simply not able to draw me in. Even Netflix failed to capture me. But, and here’s the point, CNN was able to break through the endless fog. I watched non-stop, at crazy hours. I saw things I would have missed if I had been otherwise engaged. I slept all day and watched TV all night. That’s what the flu can do to you.

Hence, I saw what I heard no reporter say, a member of the despicable ICE team literally chasing after people, for no reason, good or bad, at all, with his can of pepper spray. And when he caught them, he sprayed with vengeance and violence. To CNN he was just a background noise. But once I found him, I realized he was winning the victory of the pepper spray, his own gigantic war against humanity. I watched him multiple times. If he was defending this country against undocumented immigrants, I’d like to recommend that we keep the undocumented immigrants and send him off to a primitive prison in El Salvador.

I’d like him to have an escort: Kristi Noem and Stephen Miller. I saw the murders in Minneapolis. They were indecent and should have been X-rated. The absolute criminality on behalf of the government — unfortunately, I remind you that’s our government — was obscene. Live deaths! Not reenactments. I’m too young to have witnessed them. The tragic killings of innocents was followed immediately by the astounding lies of the truly disgraceful people who work for our government, including its leader, the guy who thinks Greenland is Iceland. I watched the footage being replayed throughout the long feverish nights. There is no doubt. Our officials were lying. These people were killed in cold blood, for no reason at all.

Now as the steam surges through my still sick body, a new attack is taking place in Georgia. A sick man is hunting for evidence, five years later, for evidence that the 2020 election was stolen from him. Certainly it wasn’t.

And one last tidbit before I descend again on the Tylenol bottle:  Did you even hear Vance on Holocaust Memorial Day? Was it that Yale degree that showed him the way to pay tribute to the millions of our people killed by Hitler without mentioning the word Jew at all?  One of our own grandkids is a Yalie who has hopefully more talent than Vance.

The flu has made me sick. But so has our country’s leadership!

Rosanne Skopp of West Orange is a wife, mother of four, grandmother of 14, and great-grandmother of nine. She is a graduate of Rutgers University and a dual citizen of the United States and Israel. She is a lifelong blogger, writing blogs before anyone knew what a blog was! She welcomes email at rosanne.skopp@gmail.com