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MOLLY PENNY Molly Penny is a local radio personality and MSU Mankato alum. It was her love of pop culture that got her interested in doing a morning show gig for KOWZ 100.9. She is now Music and Promotions Director at KOWZ & KRUE Radio in Owatonna and can be heard on various airwaves in Southern Minnesota, including Hot 96.7 in Mankato. She resides in Mankato with her movie buff husband and YouTube obsessed children. Need to contact her? Shoot her an e-mail mollyp@kowzonline.com or catch her on Twitter at @mollyhoodUSA.
Love in the Time of Coronavirus
The Many Times in my Life I Thought for Sure We would All Die of the Plague or Other Such Crises
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pidemics are older than humanity itself, and I have lost count of how many times I was certain that a virus of some variety was going to wipe out the human race. We are in the midst of another global virus that threatens to be a pandemic, with the COVID-19 or coronavirus impacting many countries throughout the world, threatening to impact the Summer Olympics and even prompting the dating app Tinder to add a warning to its app: “Tinder is a great place to meet new people. While we want you to continue to have fun, protecting you self from the coronavirus is more important,” and goes on to list some tips including washing your hands and not touching your face. In honor of our latest scare, I would like to take a stroll down memory lane past the biggest scares of my lifetime beyond just pandemics. It began…in the 80’s when it seemed that child abduction was on the rise. There was sincere panic over missing children- we would see their photos on the back of milk cartons when I was growing up and my heart still breaks for anyone who has experienced this nightmare. In 1984, Newsweek ran a cover story about child abduction featuring the photo of 10 year old Kevin Collins who is still missing to this day. In October of 1989, it hit close to home for us Minnesotans as 11 year Jacob Wetterling was abducted in his hometown of St. Joseph. 27 years later his killer led police to Jacob’s remains, but until then it had remained a chilling mystery. The high profile abduction of Polly Klaas in 1993 and in particular, the abduction of 9 year old Amber Hagerman in Arlington Texas, prompted the AMBER alert system in 1996 and regular citizens are notified immediately of these occurrences. Unfortunately the system has assisted in the safe recovery of far fewer children than we would hope. Another high profile case of a missing child occurred later that year in December of 1996 when child beauty pageant queen JonBenet Ramsey was reported missing and later found murdered in the basement of her family home. Cases like this are not fixed in the past, my own kids have lived
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Though it had originated decades earlier, HIV and AIDS did not really reach its peak in the US until the 1980’s and was commonly associated with homosexual men. Having lost 35 million to this disease, it earned its title as a pandemic. Luckily, thanks to science, the Human Immunodeficiency Virus is no longer a death sentence. Over time HIV would destroy so many CD4 cells that the body could no longer fight infections and diseases and the sufferer would then be deemed to have full blown AIDS, or acquired immunodeficiency syndrome. Medicines and lifestyle choices mitigate spreading of the original HIV, but education and basic awareness of the disease has also helped curb the rise. There was such a stigma. Transmission was most common among homosexual men and people sharing of hypodermic needles, but as a kid that didn’t matter. I thought if I got someone’s spit on an open paper cut I was surely going to contract it. As I became more educated, I realized my odds were quite low. If you were a tween in the early seasons of MTV’s The Real World, like me, you probably wept as Pedro suffered and died from complications with AIDS. A popular film starring Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington, Philideplhia also came out in 1993. We lost Freddy Mercury shortly after learning he was HIV positive, but basketball great Magic Johnson is still alive and well. The Oklahoma City bombing of 1995 brought on a National bomb scare, but more notably caused anyone who wore aviator sunglasses and hooded sweatshirts to look suspicious as that infamous look resembled the composite sketch of Timothy McVeigh which went whatever the 90’s equivalent of “viral” is. In 1997 The “Uni-bomber” responsible for the domestic terrorism that claimed the life of 168 Americans at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, which included a daycare facility, was apprehended and sentence to death and subsequently executed in 2001. McVeigh behind bars did not quell the unrest that an act of domestic terrorism could happen literally anywhere. Then on April 20th of 1999, my Junior year of high school the Columbine school shooting happened on the same day that 8th grade Cally Jo Larson of Waseca was found murdered in her home after school. Talk about a horrible
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day for all of the families involved, our local community and the Nation. As a seventeen year old at the time, it felt as though I may not make it to see the new millennium! Enter…Y2K, the shorthand term for the Year 2000. At the end of the century could not escape headlines about “Y2K”and the hysteria that life as we knew it would come to an end when the clock struck midnight on Jan 1, 2000. Yeah, so. What’s the big deal? We are talking about a culture that was pretty brand new to computer technology. Instead of allowing four digits for the year, many computer programs allowed only two digits, e.g. 99 instead of 1999. How in the world could computers compute when the date descended from 1999 to 2000? Would everything suddenly reset to 1900? Surely banks and power plans will shut down and all hell will break loose. The uncertainty of what, if any, implications this Y2K bug would have on the banking system had global markets on edge until the calendar turned. FEMA was standing at the ready, people flooded stores for canned goods, bottled water and batteries. I sucked down some blackberry brandy and watched the clock turn on my desktop PC as literally NOTHING happened. False alarm! And of course our current media hype Much like the current hype of COVID-19, Mad Cow Disease, Cholera, Ebola, SARS, the West Nile Virus, Bird Flu, H1N1 and Swine Flu just to name a few scares of the past 20 years, We know that it is going to have economic effects, and that the news will hype it up like they have every single time we have faced something similar. I think the scariest thing about the Corona virus is that it hit in the middle of an American Presidential election in a climate where memes run rampant, trust in media is an all-time low and division between and even within political parties is at an all-time high. Of all the pandemics I have lived through unscathed, this is the first I have heard the President of the United States refer to as a “hoax” despite the deaths of thousands across the world and even several in the U.S. Still, the chances of dying of Corona Virus if you are healthy is relatively low. Just make sure you are washing your hands, SMS people!
