By GORDON GLANTZ

GORDONVILLE — So there I was, a nice (well, sometimes) Jewish boy from Northeast Philly, sitting at a Catholic Mass while Sofia (raised Catholic, in deference to her mother) did her altar service.

The priest went through that portion of the Mass (I’m getting to know the routine) where the assembled flock is asked to pray for certain specific people and situations.

Included was a plea to pray for those – patients, medical professionals, etc. – dealing with coronavirus.

Given the fact that this was several weeks back, you have to give the priest props for being well in front of the curve on what has quickly turned into a pandemic that has left us sheltering in place until further notice.

Which brings me to the point of my Sunday sermon: You can’t pray this away.

This is basically what your president (not mine) was doing when he put your vice president (not mine) in charge of combating and containing it before it invaded our “great again” shores.

But it came anyway, like the invasion on the beaches of Normandy.

No, we can’t blame them for the disease itself, but we can for the sheer lack of leadership that has been clear since before this administration was selected.

Those of us with foresight asked real questions about how a circus master and his lackey would handle any crisis, and we were told to stop being such “snowflakes.”

As you battle for half-cartons of eggs and loaves of bread at the store, and then sit inside your home, scared literally to death of something we can’t see, we are all snowflakes now, are we not?

There are silver linings to almost anything, and there are here.

Families are spending time together. I have learned to live without sports on TV. Sofia, as I type in this mad fury, is taking her guitar lesson via Skype or Zoom or some such thing.

School districts have developed extensive learning plans that will come in handy on snow days or in other unforeseen scenarios.

We have all had sudden graduate-level lessons in hygiene.

The list goes on.

And topping it is that enough people – maybe, hopefully, finally — see that your president (not mine) is unfit to serve.

If Charlottesville and Puerto Rico weren’t horrifying enough, they were harbingers of what was to come.

It’s no longer about politics, to vote him out. It’s about the future health and well-being of your children and your children’s children.

Right-wing pundits like Rush Limbaugh and politicians like Rep. Matt Gaetz (R, Fla.) led the propaganda parade against coronavirus.

Ironically, Gaetz donned a gas mask to mock the hysteria before having to self-quarantine after a constituent died. Now, he is asking for the same paid sick leave he voted against as a dutiful Mitch McConnell stooge.

Limbaugh, the racist talk-show host who got a Medal of Freedom from your president (not mine) during Black History Month – and with a Tuskegee Airman in attendance – is dying of cancer and among the most vulnerable to coronavirus.

Pundits are public figures, and have an extra sense of responsibility with medals around their necks.

Politicians are, by definition, leaders.

At times such as these, we need responsibility and leadership.

The failure to take it seriously – and leaving an immediate science-based crisis to a second banana who doesn’t believe that cigarettes cause cancer or that climate change is real – put every single one of us at risk.

The bitter irony here is that many of of the respiratory issues relating to smoking  put people more at risk for coronavirus, not the mention that global warming is a mother ship for infectious diseases.

It was done while keeping one eye on the stock market and the other on the golf course. That left no hands on the wheel, and a serious crash on the side of the road.

The attitude from the top went from predicting we will have “zero” cases of coronavirus to that it is no worse than the flu to being summoned from some Fantasy Island to chopper back to the real world.

You wonder why he is not my president? This is why.

And, after this fiasco, there is no reason why he should be yours, either.

As fate would have it, there is a decent chance that coronavirus will be handled – not conquered, but handled – by the fall.

Again, it will still be there – just like AIDS, the threat of terrorism, etc. — but not to the point where we can’t live our daily lives.

This will be fodder for your president (not mine) to spike the ball in the end zone and do a touchdown dance at a red state rally.

He will pound his chest at debates and claim that he, like Neanderthals before him, hit coronavirus over the head with a rock and dragged it back to his cave to be cooked and devoured over an open fire he started by rubbing two sticks together.

Be on guard for such talk. While it is the fuel of a classic sociopath/narcissist, you don’t have to let it fill your tank.

You know it’s not true.

You know better.

I don’t say this lightly, but it is a matter of life and death.

And we need – we deserve – a president we can all call our own (even if he is not from same political party or supports all the same policies.)

And if you need to pray on it before reaching the same obvious conclusion, please do.

This column ran in The Times Herald on March 22, 2020

By GORDON GLANTZ

GORDONVILLE — Ailments?

You name them, I have — or had — them.

Whenever I’m asked to go over my list of daily medications, it takes longer than eating soup with a fork.

I’m a medical dictionary with legs.

As much as I vowed not to be my father’s son, well, I’m my father’s son.

Migraines? Check. High blood pressure? Check. Diabetes? Check? Seasonal allergies? Check?

Bad ticker? So far, so good (digits crossed).

Although I tend to dodge the flu bullet, bronchitis and strep throat know my name as if I was Norm walking into Cheers to add another brew to his tab.

I wouldn’t say I’m sickly, but I have been sick.

And never as sick as I was during the weekend of July 4, 2014.

That’s when I was stricken with Lyme disease.

It happened on a schlep through the torturous Long Island Expressway (LIE), which I call the “Big Lie” because it should not have the word expressway in the title, just to visit Cape May 2.0 – Mystic, Conn.

Mystic was nice enough, I guess (eye roll), but it sits perilously close to a town called Old Lyme, Conn. We were there, in the birthplace of Lyme disease, for a visit to one of those beaches that isn’t really a beach and I had the temerity to sit on a bench in the shade and listen to some tunes.

A few days later, we were in the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center and I was shivering as if the joint was a meat locker. I had to sit outside, in the warmest spot I could find, for some cold comfort.

The ride home was just as bad. It was clear I was not well. I remember being in a Wawa outside of Chalfont, again shivering and feeling so close and yet so far from our front door and my own bed.

Because we have a family tradition of not knowing how to use any of our 17 “easy-to-use” thermometers, we were only guessing at the level of my fever.

It wasn’t until I checked out an irksome rash on my hip that it all made sense. I Googled “Lyme disease” – birthplace Old Lyme, Conn., where 7 in 10 ticks carry the disease – and the rash was a match to the traditional bull’s eye that deer ticks leave on the hide of their victims.

Because of the holiday weekend, there was no way I could wait to see my family doctor (he would have probably just told me to lose weight anyway, since that’s his solution to everything), so we spent Independence Day in the ER.

The doctors and nurses — and assorted others — were at-first dubious of my self-diagnosis but were quickly made believers.

The problem, I was even more ill than I thought. Too ill to even treat until they stabilized my vital signs with an IV drip and began chipping away at my 103.5 fever.

I left a few hours later as a “lucky one.” Lyme disease is not something you want to miss, and it was caught early. My fever went from a 103-101 seesaw to a 101-99 seesaw and then normalized by the end of the week.

But the rest of the month of July was, pretty much, one long nap. I’m not just talking my typical middle-aged lazy guy naps (I’m an Olympic Nap medalist going back to the 1988 Games).

These were more like daily comas.

While it would be a stretch to say I had any serious lasting effects, I can also say I was never quite the same.

And to think it was all caused by miniscule blood-sucking insect that, to my mind, serves no earthly purpose.

I wouldn’t wish Lyme disease on my worst enemy — well, maybe a Dallas Cowboys fan from Philadelphia (I’ll let you slide if you are from Texas) — and it’s encouraging that there is awareness and measures to take when being outdoors (my solution is to avoid the woods altogether, but I know some of you don’t understand the wonder of a temperature-controlled environment).

But here is the bitter reality, and all the hiding inside can’t get us around it: Lyme disease is only going to rise as one of the many signs of climate change.

LymeDisease.org issued the ominous results of a new study by Carnegie Mellon University and the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine and Science, which looked at the relationship between climatic variables and the occurrence of Lyme disease in 15 U.S. states and predicted — not warned, but predicted — an approximate 20 percent increase in Lyme disease by mid-century, with 95 percent of the cases in the Northeast and Upper Midwest.

“Tick-borne diseases are an important public health concern and the incidence of these infections is increasing in the United States and worldwide,” said Igor Dumic, researcher at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine and Science and the Mayo Clinic Health System, who led the study. “Lyme disease is a classic example of the link between environmental factors and the occurrence and spread of disease.”

Those who refuse to acknowledge that climate change does not exist, don’t realize that it already affects them in ways they can’t fathom, and it may not become more real until their house burns up in a California wildfire or if a tick does what it did to me — crawls up and bites them on the butt.

The aforementioned study, which appeared in the Canadian Journal of Infectious Diseases and Microbiology, is enough for me to keep my eyes glued wide open.

From 1991 to the present, it has been raining Lyme ticks. From then until the present, cases after have risen from 10,000 to 28,000 per year the last five years, and I was caught without an umbrella in the place for which the scourge is named.

The fact that I caught my bout with Lyme early enough to avoid permanent damage was worth all those lottery tickets that never net me more than enough to buy more.

I know what it’s like not to be well, generally. Specifically, I know what it’s like to have Lyme disease.

Sadly, with no one immune to the environment, more of us are in line waiting to have our numbers called.

This column originally ran in The Times Herald on Dec. 9.