All kinds of “information” about COVID protection is published....the vaccine will mitigate your symptoms if you get COVID....then they added monoclonal antibodies as an infusion to mitigate the mitigation. Then they added booster shots to mitigate the mitigation of the mitigation. These were all added to the wearing of masks to prevent the likelihood of catching or transmitting COVID, that is, to mitigate the transmission of the virus.
Level after level of mitigation.... Plus social distancing (which is not being observed), then wearing a mask when you enter a restaurant which, when you are seated, you can take off, but when you stand to leave, the mask must be put on again.
This writer is labelling the four mitigations the four types of tzuris. These types of tzuris parallel the four kashas that all thinking citizens will have about the four types of tzuris. But the questions must be suppressed because the four mitigations are still needed even if you have had Covid and recovered and have natural immunity. Why? Because you can never be too safe. So, if you add the four mitigations to the original immunity from having had Covid, you have five mitigations.
Then, perhaps new strains of Covid are on the horizon that cannot be mitigated but will require a new vaccine, although, like this vaccine, it will not be officially approved because they do not have five years to provide long term studies. So a new EUA (Emergency Use Authorization) will be issued for the new vaccine to "supplement" the old vaccine, but this too will need the four mitigations.
The four mitigations are also known as the four types of "tzuris" which help maintain our social cohesion when we are falling apart. Thus the mask is tzuris one, the vaccine is tzuris two...well, you get the idea.... America is the land of opportunity, but in short order it is becoming the land of tzuris, and this gives rise to at least four questions regarding why this time of history is different from all other times of history, so in that sense we are the land of the four kashas.
But if we ask additional kashas, we are denounced as troublemakers, so it's better not to get on the wrong path, that is, it is better not to ask the first four questions, otherwise, like the shots, one question will lead to another, and questions lead to disobedience and disobedience leads to anarchy and anarchy leads to violence and remedial punishment (intern camps).
So forget the tzuris, forget the kashas, forget that doubting Thomas mindset that is starting to undermine your belief in the authorities, and just think of mitigation and prevention. Mitigation. Prevention. Mitigation. Prevention. Then someday we'll be happy. Must be. It's on the horizon.
I saw it yesterday, but it's possible I have a high fever and am seeing things.
Jeffrey Ludwig is a Harvard University Master Teacher who has taught at Harvard, Penn State, Juniata, and Boston State College as well as written numerous articles and poems. He has recently published a memoir about his childhood in Philadelphia.