The Real Sentinel News 200403

The Sentinel All the news that's fit to print and some that's not.
A Future of Isolation This reporter sees the coming of time when this nation will live in relative isolation from other humans. This has been a long time coming and with the Covid-19 virus forcing us to separate from others it may be the tipping point. In the next few months we will become acclimated to social distancing and then may choose to continue after the current virus threat subsides. Whether this does it or not, it will happen. This trend started way back in the sixties. Prior to that time, in the heat of summer families sat outside in the evenings waiting for the house to cool off before bedtime. Neighbors came over and face to face conversations were the norm. Then along came air-conditioning. Families no longer spent time outside on hot, stifling evenings. Interactions with neighbors vanished from the scene. Televisions kept people inside the home blithely watching dreadful programming. People left the neighborhoods and moved to the southwest and California where contact with those living next door was rare. The second nail in the coffin came with the proliferation of cell phones. We are all familiar with what has happened since. People are in the same room using cell phones to send links to each other to watch a third person's funny video. Parents text their children to come down for lunch or supper. Young people gather in bars and restaurants, not to personally converse, but to sit watching things on their phones. The third nail in the coffin has arrived with TV commercials promoting "stay at home on your couch, order your new furniture from Wayfair, sit on the couch and buy your new car from Carvana, enjoy couch arrest with Sling TV and never have to leave the living room, grow new hair while on your couch with the Capillis hair restoring laser lit baseball cap."	Doctors & Nurses This publication's staff wants to give a rousing cheer for these dedicated people. Their normal dedication in daily work in offices and hospitals is commendable. They continually study new procedures and new concepts in medicine with care for patients in relative safety, excepting emergency wards in big cities where insane Saturday nights bring in gunshot victims and perpetrators and people out of their minds with illicit drugs. This publication has expressed admiration for nurses and the care they give, referring to them as angels on earth several times now but the thinking is that it should be repeated over and over. All that being said, now the doctors and nurses are facing death every shift they report to at work. It is not imminent death like soldiers on a battlefield. This death can be rapid or slow and they won't know when they contracted the virus until it overtakes their system. Not only currently employed doctors and nurses are facing this danger, but when the call went out, retired doctors and nurses are rushing to the scene, risking their lives to help others. This is the ultimate in human behavior, giving of oneself for others. It takes a special person to do that when there is so much danger involved.	End of Life This is a subject many people never want to think about much less speak about it. However, right now is a good time to inform family members of your wishes. Anyone in this country or around the world for that matter could succumb to the Covid-19 virus in two weeks from this moment. Surviving family members should know what your wishes are so they do not have to decide and possibly argue over how you should be buried. You may not want to think or speak of it, but you owe it to the family to let them know what you want for your ultimate demise. This reporter and his lovely bride have made our plan perfectly clear to our family. We both want to be returned to ashes in a crematory; we want no service. We want to be like footprints in the sand, washed away with the rising tide as though they were never there. Death is nothing to fear, it will happen no matter what we do. The only thing to fear is the pain in the final days prior to leaving this earthly plane and there is a solution to that, hospice. Once in hospice those wonderful angels on earth I spoke of previously can and will make the pain vanish with modern living through chemistry. You won't even know what is happening until those angels from heaven call you to rejoin your maker. By the way, there are no streets paved with gold or mansions in heaven that you may have bought by handing over donations to your pastor's church. Think about it; you leave this world as a spirit and you have no need for streets or mansions. You have the spirit of God to be with.