Babbling Botkin: "What If My Husband Dies?" - Part One

 Hello, folks!  I hope things are going well for you and yours!

We're getting ready to send the Spawn back to school in early September. 

 I'm nervous because his school is too rural and too poor for COVID preparedness to mean much.  We're rural enough that high speed internet is not available out here.  My husband and I willingly pony up $54.00 a month for the highest speed we can get which measures between 9-13 Mbps.   What this means practically is that we can stream one video from Netflix or YouTube as long as we don't try to do anything more complicated that loading a single webpage or refreshing a Kindle at the same time.   We can kind of do a live stream for Zoom or Facebook Live - but it's glitchy.  I can't complain much; we are ideally located in line with a tower and can afford the cost.  A lot of families are less well situated or can't afford the cost. 

I'm excited because Spawn did really well at school last winter and he's much stronger and sturdier now.  His class is fairly small - there were 7 little boys in his room last year - and the school is doing what it can to keep the kids from sneezing in each other's face for the fun of it.   

I also expect that Michigan will be unceremoniously dumped backwards into Stage 3 where schools have to be online only within 4-6 weeks.  After that, Michigan will either keep moving between Stage 3 and 4 all winter - or worse - we'll stay in Stage 4 with districts having close randomly when their student body drops below 75% attendance.  It'd be a bit like snow days meeting whack-a-mole.

I needed something to amuse me - so I was incredibly happy to see that Geoffrey Botkin has made another stab at becoming a media mogul. The fifth times a charm I'm sure!  He's created a dotcom website of his own name and linked that to the a YouTube channel he titled "Stand Up and Lead".  It looks like he did a dump of a bunch of videos and podcasts in mid-July and has been posting a few new videos a week.   

He seems to be attempting to position himself as a source of information in a world that is falling apart due to a pandemic.  That surprises me none at all.  See, Geoffrey Botkin's free podcasts from back before Vision Forum imploded always began with a section about how Western Civilization was teetering on the brink of complete collapse into anarchy.  Honestly, I find those kind of doom and gloom predictions funny because Americans often do their best when faced with stressors.   In true American fashion, most people have responded responsibly to the pandemic - and the increased sense of duty helped Black Lives Matter focus on police brutality finally receive the public support it deserves. 

Most of his videos and podcasts seems to fit into revisionist history, lightweight prepping, and advice column fare.   While revisionist history is fun when I'm looking for a rabbit hole of White Supremacy to debunk, today I'm picking "Advice column fare with a CP/QF twist" for $100.   

The first video column that caught my eye was "What If My Husband Dies?".   Since half of my objections to the meager educational offerings given to SAHDs can be summarized by "What if you need to support yourself?" I was extremely curious to hear Geoffrey Botkin's take on this one.  

Let's dive in!

The video opens overlooking a fog-filled forest as gray clouds roll overhead.   Soft music plays beneath. The title "What If My Husband Dies?" appears in the lower right hand corner as the mystical chimes swell.    Suddenly, we are in Geoffrey Botkin's study.  There is a large slider door behind his right shoulder, bookcases in the corner directly behind him and a leather couch in front of a window behind his left shoulder.   He's working at a L-shaped desk as we see him working at the computer.   He completely believably pivots from the spreadsheet/corn futures report/widgets screen of his computer to face the camera.

[00:00:05] Ok.  This uh tough question that we get today is from a a wife and mother whose says she's concerned about her husband dying.  He has apparently chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.  It's a chronic inflammatory lung disease and there is no known cure at this at this point right now.  And I could say `you know to this mother and wife you know something really cheery about  you know "Don't worry.  Uh.  The death rates are so way far below early projections.  The infection rates are lower than the projections.  You know.  It's that he's probably not going you know gonna get this coronavirus thing and have to go to the hospital where there are other people with the coronavirus. 

We are less than a full minute into the video and I've already created a macro so that typing "yk" substitutes "you know" in my transcription program.     We all have filler  phrases we use when our fluency fails - mine are "like", "uh" and "you know" - but I'm more interested in when Geoffrey Botkin uses more stutter phrases and when he uses less. 

 Why?

Fluency drops for a lot of reasons - but emotional reactions and cognitive dissonance both tend to increase filler words.    

Geoffrey Botkin is struggling hard with describing a man who has an untreatable chronic lung disorder in the middle of a respiratory virus pandemic.    I can't blame him for that; it's a scary situation at any age.   Botkin comes up with an allegedly upbeat comfort line for the mother - but nothing in his body language or voice makes me believe in his dismissal of coronavirus.   And honestly - I suspect Geoffrey Botkin knows his words of comfort ring hollow because he's inserting multiple filler phrases per sentence.  

My son had damaged lungs from birth until he was around 18 months old.   For the first year of his life, an ordinary cold would have likely sent him to the hospital.  If he caught RSV, he would certainly have back in the hospital with a life-threatening attack on his lungs.   From that experience, I'm well aware that the overall death rate and overall infection rates mean nothing when the one person you care desperately about might die if he catches a minor virus that most people never know they have.  

The fear never really left me during the first year.  I couldn't let it; being aware at all times of proper handwashing and isolation techniques was all we had to keep Spawn safe.   We did keep Spawn safe - but it's much easier to do so with an only child who has two parents and grandparents who are onboard than an adult man who has to support a family and has children at home.

Bluntly, 160,000 people have died in the US from COVID-19.  The lower infection rates and lower death rates are of little comfort to their families and friends.

[00:00:51] Yes, it is a - quote - comorbidity that he has but this is not really the heart of your question. It's not really about worry, but it's about a situation that could happen not just to you but any mother.  The death of your husband.  I mean it could happen to anyone of you wives and moms out there so let's talk about life for you and your sons - a life with no dad in the house.  That's what you are really asking about.  And what your future could be. Yes, it could be.  And statistically more than a lot of other moms and wives out there.

Statistically speaking, marriages end in two ways: death or divorce.  This mom is more likely to face an early widowhood - but CP/QF moms still face divorce far more regularly than the death of their spouse.  Of the five CP/QF mommy bloggers I followed starting around 2010, two have divorced in the last decade.

Let's be honest here - there's another set of dependent children we need to be thinking of.  Stay-at-home daughters (SAHD) who are deeply sheltered from the scary world of working outside of family businesses are in perilous positions once the primary breadwinner of the family dies.  Alison Greene of Ask A Manager recommends people work while they attend school  because by 20 job candidates who do not work are being compared to other candidates who have worked four years in various teenage jobs.    Sarah Mally would be compared to candidates who have worked for two decades or more if she needed to enter the workforce now.   So would Sarah Maxwell, Anna Sofia Botkin and Elizabeth Botkin.

Geoffrey Botkin is directing this at an unnamed woman - but Victoria Botkin should be taking notes for how to support herself and her two unmarried daughters if Geoffrey dies before them.

[00:01:25] Now. let's look at the situation in America for a second.  

Where else would we look, O Guru of Global Perspectives?   

Geoffrey Botkin was born in the US.  He was raised in the US.  He went to college in the US and married an American woman.  He worked for a US lobbying group trying to bring Biblical norms back into power.  To the best of my knowledge, all of his kids were born in the US.  There was that time that the Botkin Family moved over to New Zealand for two years to try their hand at creating a media empire Christchurch. Spoiler alert: It failed. (That was Attempt Two of Five based on my informal, off-the-cuff reckoning.)  So....he could talk about the situation in New Zealand a few years after the turn of the millenium compared to now - but would that attract an audience?   Hard to tell - but since he and his  family's returned to the US, I'm gonna guess not.  

The letter writer - if she exists - will probably never read this - but my advice based on the first 90 seconds of this talk is to loop your husband's pulmonologist in on any concerns your family has.   If your husband doesn't have a pulmonologist, please get a referral from his general practitioner.   COVID-19 has made life a lot more frightening for everyone - and triply so for people with chronic lung conditions.  Having said that, a discussion of what your husband can do to improve his lung health right now and what to think about if he does come down with COVID-19 will likely be less frightening than feeling helpless and hopeless.  Good luck!