No one is to blame for COVID-19. Maybe the bat in Wuhan that, supposedly, started it all but not, as some have claimed, George Soros or Asian operatives who are hell-bent on destroying America.

Yet many in this country are to blame for the spread of the disease, both in Washington D.C., on the air, and in communities nationwide. Even Forrest Gump understood that "stupid is as stupid does," but too many Americans, faced with the inconvenience created by a global pandemic, see what they want to see and hear what they want to hear.

America hasn't faced a common enemy since the '40s. Eighty years ago, we sacrificed, rationed, lent a hand to our neighbors, and got through it. Now, after decades of nearly uninterrupted prosperity, an unflattering self-preservational selfishness rapidly revealed itself once people started thinking they were vulnerable.

People flocked to markets in droves (ignorning social distancing entirely) to stock up on food -- not enough to see them through two weeks of self-quarantine but to hold them for months. The implication is that no one will forgo the oversized portions that have made the majority of the country obese. And God forbid that anyone should miss a meal.

The good and very bad news is that, in some towns, the lines outside of grocery stores were shorter than the lines in front of gun shops. Gotta keep marauders away from all those rolls of toilet paper.

It makes one wonder. Why would anybody need that much TP? Perhaps Americans really are full of....

I tried to buy a few things at the market today. Few is the relevant word.

That’s because the shelves in the stores that I managed to enter — two of the four had cars queued in the parking lot waiting for space, so I couldn’t go in — were almost totally bare. It was a scene out of Life magazine at the height of the Cold War, showing rows of empty shelves in stores in Moscow.

The pandemic panic has its grips on the country. Despite the official advice to have two weeks of essentials — to tide you over if you have to self-quarantine — this looked as if everyone expected the zombie apocalypse and needed to stock up for months, if not longer.

If there’s a message in this, it isn’t subtle. It’s “as long as I get mine, who gives a damn if you get yours.” It might be self-preservational, but it’s selfish, plain and simple.

Things in people’s baskets overflowed. It wasn’t just food and supplies to tide them over. It was food and supplies to ensure they wouldn’t give up a thing — not the size of their portions or a meal or the volume of hand sanitizer that they planned to slather on.

Sacrifice to aid the common good seems as alien as Washington’s embrace of reality. If Americans had been this way in 1941, it’s possible that our common language now would be German.

With so many Americans likely to suffer as jobs disappear and supplies of essential goods drop with them, the attitude of the shoppers I encountered today is contemptible. It was, also, a little dimwitted: anyone afraid of infection should not be mingling in crowds. You don’t know where they’ve been.

Humans trace their lineage to a site in Tanzania where, millions of years ago, the first hominids appeared in the Olduvai Gorge.

My own history is an infinitessimal portion of that timeline, but the business world seems to think that I am just as old as any of the Leakeys’ fossils.

According to my physician, the tests from my annual physical this year suggest that I’m about 23… and an elite athlete. Those tests aren’t wrong. They’re just not right. Not in absolute, calendar terms.

The gap years
Yet, as far as hiring managers are concerned, I’m C.U. — Chronologically Undesirable. Of course, before they see me, they adore me. In written correspondence, proposals sent online, and phone conversations, I’m exactly what they’re looking for. I understand their business inside out, some have claimed, and they need to take advantage of my insights right away.

As soon as I walk in the office, however, or they look me up online and see a photograph, they’ve suddenly “decided to go in another direction” (I’ve heard southwest is nice) or “put the position on hold” (until they find somebody younger) or “feel that the chemistry wouldn’t be right” (which might make sense if the business made drugs). No one dares to say what they mean: “You’re old.”

That fact can’t be denied. But that doesn’t mean I’m dead or out of touch with current trends or technologies. As J. M. Barrie wrote, “I’m not young enough to know everything,” but my younger peers (or non-peers, in their estimation) feel that they do. But they don’t.

The knowledge gap
For instance…. In advertising, the lust for youth seems never ending. Older creatives either open their own shops or get forced out. They’re seen as incapable of appealing to families, kids, and making products that they use appear essential. However, those same young writers and designers and account execs are given assignments for Depends and geriatric pharmaceuticals and retirement plans and other products used by people over 50.

Those accounts involve products and services that younger people haven’t ever used and probably won’t for decades. The over-50 folk, though, have raised families, put kids through college, paid for weddings, taken everybody on vacations in the same kinds of cars, eaten in the same types of restaurants, bought the same food, and now may have grandchildren who keep them in touch with the latest in fashion, fears, jargon, sports, and what they like and hate the most in school.

A gaping discrepancy
So who really has the background and resources to handle current businessplace needs? Who’s really in favor diversity when different genders and races are acceptable but people in different age groups are not? Who’s got problems managing people when those people are older? Who’s afraid of hiring people who might (just perhaps) be smarter than they are when the whole skill of management is finding people who do what they do better than you do what they do… and then letting them do it?

Yeah, there’s a chasm. An older guy gorge. And when today’s young people, in a world of robotics and AI, find they’re in it, I’ll be glad that I won’t be around to hear them complain.

Early voting is a wonderful bad idea. The convenience is unmistakable, but the surprises can be very alarming.

For the first time, early voting was an option in The Golden State. Calfornians had just over a week, including weekends, to find a “station” and cast their ballots, and I was among them. I left feeling positive — about the process and my votes — and went home full of 21st Century, modernist pride. Then I heard.

My candidate dropped out of the race. What? On the eve of Super Tuesday? Before the big numbers came in? I was horrified. My vote had been wasted (for that office, at least). And voting doesn’t let you have do-overs.

The best laid plans
In a sense, I felt betrayed. My choice wasn’t someone who’d been hanging by a funding thread for weeks. Not someone who ignored the inevitable. My candidate had strengthened every week of the campaign, had earned the respect of every pundit, and was poised to make a difference. I thought.

Politics has always been an endless stream of negotiated/compromised agreements. Or it was until Newt Gingrich was the Speaker of the House. His take-no-prisoners approach was both intransigent and frequently insulting to opponents. He was the perfect precursor for the current Name Caller in Chief, and he served to foreshadow the Tea Party mantra of no compromise.

His successor in both substance and style is Kentucky’s senior senator, a man with no neck; his flesh goes directly from his chin to his chest in uninterrupted wattle. He has raised legislative obstruction to the status of immovable object, all in service to the Incredible Bulk who sits behind the Resolute Desk. The two of them, aided and abetted by others in their party, made Republican early voting an extinction event — by eliminating primaries in states that might run a Republican challenger to The Don, they made certain that their Chosen One would face no opposition. At least, not from inside. God only knows what they’re planning to do from outside.

A cautionary tale
But for Democrats, at least this time around, I have a humble suggestion: don’t cast your vote until you know who’s in the running: unlike at the racetrack, you do not get your bet back when your candidate is scratched.