Stuff That I Have Noticed #30 Vincent Misiano on Covid -19

Once again I’m posting someone else’s words. This time they’re from an old friend/colleague, Vincent Misiano. If you are a reader of on-screen credits Vince’s name might be familiar. He has directed and/or produced scores of network TV shows from The West Wing through Bull. I worked with Vince (and his brother Chris, now also a major director) back in my TV commercial producing years when they were respectively a prop master and a key grip. (We all had to start somewhere.) Both were very good at those jobs and fun to work with.

Vince posted the below essay on Facebook several weeks ago and I saved it specifically in order to share it with you. (Published with Vince’s permission.)


We should know that recovery from a Covid infection is both possible and, in fact, likely for most people, but this disease is extraordinary in that it seems to effect individuals uniquely—some don’t know (may never know) that they encountered Covid 19. Some feel sick. Some feel very sick. Some are hospitalized. Some go into a cytokene storm and die quickly and there are some who are put on ventilators. These last linger for weeks. Some survive. They are diminished. But [many] do not survive and treating them with ventilators truly endangers the medical staff who are trying to help them.

This last may be unsustainable.

The moral and ethical choices our society is being called upon to make are not unprecedented…except at this frightening and concentrated scale.


Still, I want all of us to have hope that behaving responsibly will save us. Stay home. If you must go out, do so responsibly. Saving yourself is the material incentive we have to behave well, but only individual character determines whether we will also act with kindness, empathy and social conscience in order to save others.


Tell friends and family that you love them and then love them. Forgive them and yourself.


Finally, don’t lose sight of fools and malefactors. Observe and take notes. Don’t let them be rewarded when (SOON GOD PLEASE!) this is over.

I’m looking at you Donald, Donald Jr., Ivanka, Eric, Jared and the most evil Machiavellian mastermind of our nightmare politics, Mitch McConnell. Don’t think I’ve forgotten you Rupert, Rush, Sean, O’Reilly, Savage, Newt, Laura, et al, all the now mainstream Republican freaks and trolls on what used to be called the reactionary right—authoritarian, fascistic, fearful, xenophobic, fundamentalist, extremist and either unwittingly or willfully ignorant. May you all feel the pain you’ve inflicted on others until the moral scales are balanced.


The above is what happens when time, a keyboard and internet access come together. I feel a little better. So ends today’s sermon.

Vincent Misiano