Clark County’s COVID-19 numbers continued to surge this week, bumping the county even further into the red “high activity” zone and shattering the hope that local students might return to their classrooms before the Thanksgiving holiday.
We know spending hours of your free time listening to political debates isn’t something anyone (except maybe a few political journalists who live for the thrill of election season) really wants to do right now, especially in the middle of a deadly global pandemic that our current president seems hellbent on spreading far and wide despite public health experts’ dire warnings against shooting for “herd immunity.”
We realize many of our readers may already be a few clicks past “burned out” this election season — especially if they happened to tune in to that trainwreck of a presidential debate on Tuesday — but we would urge folks to dig deep and not let interest in the election wane over the next few weeks.
The “us versus them” mentality that has been steadily growing in this country over the past decade seems to have reached a new high, or perhaps a “new low,” this week.
If one thing stands out from last weekend’s “Back the Blue” pro-police rally in downtown Camas, it should be this: several young people from the Black Lives Matter counterprotest reported feeling threatened by people armed with baseball bats, handguns and long guns.
Given the fact that most of these long, slow COVID weeks feel like we’re all swimming upstream in a river of molasses, it’s always a bit startling to look back at a month’s worth of news stories before writing this monthly Cheers & Jeers column and realize just how much has happened over the past four weeks. August, at least in Camas-Washougal, has been a month filled with Cheers-worthy news.
It is becoming increasingly clear to anyone listening, reading or watching news sources outside the right to far-right news bubble of FOX News, The Washington Times, OAN, The Epoch Times, National Review, etc., that our president and his upper-echelon supporters may be trying to sabotage the November general election by seeding doubt about vote-by-mail systems and destroying the United States Postal Service.
When the COVID-19 pandemic first shuttered schools in March, no one could have suspected that, five months later, local school superintendents would be pushing for an online start to the 2020-21 school year.
This month’s Cheers & Jeers is a little different in that we only have one of each, but since nothing in 2020 is even close to “normal,” we’re hoping our readers will forgive us.
