… and that would be the late Stephen Hawking. Of course, that’s after a long and highly productive life, astrophysicist Dr. Stephen Hawking.
Sufferer of ALS since his early twenties, Dr. Stephen Hawking. Dr. Stephen Hawking, more famous for his wheelchair than for his numerous achievements.
I’m not speaking to my reader, of course, but to Ken Turnage II of Antioch, California, who had the half-wit to say this:
“[T]he World has been introduced to a new phrase Herd Immunity which is a good one,” he wrote. “In my opinion we need to adapt a Herd Mentality. A herd gathers it ranks, it allows the sick, the old, the injured to meet its natural course in nature.”
As NBC Bay Area reported, Turnage wrote that the pandemic also would address homeless people in that it would “fix what is a significant burden on our society and resources that can be used.” [WaPo]
While City Council members removed him from his position as chair of a planning commission for being “insensitive,” they really should have read him the riot act, pointing out that there’s no necessary connection between good health and intellectual excellence, that there are literally millions upon millions of ill people who have made significant, sometimes towering, contributions to human society, from science (Hawking), the literary scene (Proust), religion (pick your sect and you’ll find some sickly person who’s made significant contributions), and etc. If we extend this to the elderly, many folks do their best work in their senior years, drawing on a lifetime of experience and creativity in a huge variety of occupations, of which I might only exclude sports, and even some sports do not exclude excellence by the elderly.
This dude’s unwillingness to put himself out in order to help the physically weak suggests that he should be the first thrust off the lifeboat next time there’s an opportunity. The rationalization to do so need not be true; I merely answer the call of dramatic reality. But I suspect intellectual insufficiency would be an adequate explanation.
