I still don't feel well. Head thick and achy, joints still tender, skin still tender, still coughing occasionally, and now I have a crick in my neck. Either that, or the flu has turned into encephalitis. (I don't really think so. I'm sure I slept oddly. Too many naps on the sofa.) I sleep like this tyke in the photo.
Esteemed Spouse has been gone since about 12:30 for his classes and won't be home until 9:30 or so tonight. I'm usually not here, obviously, so it feels weird to me. I'm right about one thing, though. There really is NOTHING on television. However, I don't seem able to read tonight. My eyes feel dried out and burning. Worse, my brain feels dried out and burning.
Of course I've been far sicker with the flu before. That Tamiflu works well, it seems. According to the literature, it stops the virus from continuing to invade the body's other systems. Hurrah for modern medicine. Beats the heck out of blood-letting and other primitive treatments.
I still am going around and around in my mind over a central important question: Why do people believe something if there is simply no evidence for it? Or if the evidence is merely hearsay or has other flaws? For instance, it takes only a minute to find evidence that President Obama's birth certificate is legitimate and that he is totally a citizen of the U.S. But if one of the right-wing nut jobs simply IMPLIES that the birth certificate is a forgery, suddenly uneducated people (who are admittedly already prejudiced against someone who is "different")accept the right-winger's assertions as if they were carved in stone and had all sorts of proof behind them. Critical thinking does not exist for such people. Logos doesn't count at all. Ethos counts only insofar as the speaker is saying what the audience already believes or wants to believe. Pathos counts until the speaker tries to use it to change the audience's attitudes. As long as the argument based on pathos is used to reinforce what the audience believes is so, it works powerfully.
We need another Age of Reason. What we do NOT need is another Great Awakening, since all that gets awakened is superstition and prejudice. We'll be burning witches at the stake before much longer if we keep taking backward steps. I suddenly had a horrible thought. If I'd lived in a previous time, I would have been treated as a witch because I refuse to swallow the dogma hook, line, and sinker. I'd have challenged the authorities once too often, and that would have been the end of me. It's a good thing that not only do I not live in an earlier time, I no longer live in the Deep South. West Michigan is bad enough. After everything my relatives have put me through, I know now that I will never live again in the Deep South. I simply cannot tolerate attitudes that smell like the Spanish Inquisition.
Speaking of what my relatives have done to me lately, my husband's sister-in-law sent me a bunch of photos of snakes of all sorts that have been killed in Jena. (Gee, some of them might be my kinfolk....) I emailed her and told her that I wasn't too fond of snakes and that I didn't like to see photos of them. First, I don't like snakes. I really really don't. But I don't like to see photos of all kinds of snakes killed indiscriminately for no other reason than that they could be killed. Horrendous. Pointless. A snake gets in your yard or house, kill it. But to go out into the woods to hunt snakes to kill, just to do it, well, that's simply sadistic.
I guess I should do something work-related. Or not.
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