All right, don’t panic…I’m standing more than six feet away from you as you read this. You have nothing to fear. (Well, that can of pop at your elbow…have you thoroughly disinfected that, and then washed your hands like you were about to perform surgery? No? Go ahead. I’ll wait.)
It’s like we live in a whole new country, isn’t it? Or a time of love and cholera without the love. Or at the very least the worst of those infectious disease films you can watch late nights on Netflix. No zombies, but no toilet paper, either. That was an odd first item for stores to sell out of, wasn’t it? TP wasn’t my first thought, though life can be uncomfortable quickly if you run out of it; I guess I was just more focused on the items that would make a need for toilet paper after digestion. You know, food? Worst-case scenario, I can turn my garden hose into a temporary bidet if I need to, but I’m going to need food for certain. The various disinfectants made sense, as did the rubber gloves and masks, but my first thought was food and drink. (Admit it: you’re drinking more during the lockdown, aren’t you? Or you want to at least.)
Now that someone has pulled their collective heads out of their asses, things seem to have settled down somewhat, though we are all surely tired of sitting at home with nowhere to go. As we begin to think about the virus and its impact on our lives, it’s important to take into consideration where it came from, how it was created, how it spread so fast, and what we need to do to get past it. If you know someone directly affected by the virus, it might be good to start talking about how we can recover. First, however, we have to clearly define what the virus is.
What Is the Virus?
The virus isn’t the coronavirus–the virus we are dealing with is actually recalcitrance. It’s been with us for a long time, and it is keeping us from using our most valuable weapon: each other. Stubbornness appears to be unwilling to go away without a fight, as evidenced from some of the fireworks we see on the pages of Facebook, or even in your local WalMart. Everyone thinks they know better than anyone else, and we have decided that we don’t have to listen to anyone ever again with regards to anything. They can’t tell us where to go, they can’t tell us what they think, and they sure as shit can’t point out a flaw in our logic or in our sources. No one is going to tell me what to do because I’m a ‘Murican.
What is up with that? Whether you are from the right, the left, the middle, or up around the bend and over the next hill, you’re still a human being and a resident of the United States of America, right? You have to listen to reason, and acknowledge that our country is established on the basis of a group of laws that are part of the framework of our societal structure; if you do, then you also have to agree that there are times when you can’t, in fact, do anything you want. There are some things that are prohibited by law. At the same time, there are many things that are guaranteed by law, and they can’t take them away from you.
And they haven’t.
No, you can’t currently have the freedom to assemble as guaranteed by our constitution; under normal circumstances you can, but this situation is anything but normal, and close contact with infected individuals can lead to you directly infecting anywhere from 1 to 100 other people. If you take that scenario out to its logical conclusion, it is a recipe for disaster that has rarely been concocted in the history of our country, such as when the Spanish Flu ran rampant in the early part of the 20th century. It’s not some insidious plan to take away your freedoms, folks, but many of you are far too stubborn for your own good. That’s your right, yes, and you should be able to determine how you deal with such a situation for yourself; after all, it’s your life.
Except it isn’t.
Your Choices Can Cost Them Their Lives
THIS IS A PANDEMIC, PEOPLE. As this sentence is being written, there are 35,955 deaths attributed to COVID-19 in America; not the 240,000 that was the upper end of their best-case scenario of 45 days ago, but a fraction of that amount. The government clearly over-reacted. (I mean, that kind of is their job, isn’t it? Imagine the fallout if they didn’t do enough and the millions died that were predicted if they did nothing. Anarchy.) The mainstream media–or whatever you want to call it–were too busy trying to rake Donny’s feet across the coals. The Left–shudder!–blew it way out of proportion in order to fool the American people into turning their backs on our illustrious leader. Only (only!) 35,955 Americans have died from this thing!
Scroll over on that page now. The far left of worldometers.info tells us that there have been 690,900 cases of people with the coronavirus to date; if one looks a few columns to the right, however, it tells us that there have been 58,263 who have recovered. Look at the next column: 596,682. Those are the active cases in our country right now. If we take that fatality rate of approximately 5.2% and apply it to the number of cases still active, we could expect another 31,000 deaths due to COVID-19. This is assuming, of course, that there is a ventilator available for every patient who needs one, and it has been reported in several places that there are not, and that not every patient who goes on a ventilator survives the illness.
So, when you have a federal government who chooses to do little beyond restricting flights from a specific country, and a “news network” that advises people not to panic, that this virus is “no worse than the flu,” and then that same tandem finally agrees a month later that maybe people should stay away from each other for a while, how likely is it that the population as a whole will comply with that directive? Given that they have been provided with very mixed messages from the outset, and that that tandem has been stating loudly without letup for years that no one but they themselves can be trusted for information, how many would choose to ignore any advice that restricts their movement in public spaces? When a national government fails to take what many consider adequate precautions, and hotspots of the pandemic flare up in their states, what choice do those state and local governments have? Don’t do enough and they have failed the people they serve; shut everything down so the virus can be contained, and suddenly we’re in concentration camps.
The current restriction of activities in this state (Michigan) are in place because some of you couldn’t be trusted to shelter in place as advised.
Listen to Each Other and Think
My biggest complaint is how we can’t even engage in an intelligent conversation about things; every disagreement becomes a shouting match within seconds. It’s the liberals who want to do this, and the conservatives who refuse to do that; it’s always Liberal versus Conservative, or Democrat versus Republican, when the only genuine way to think about it is Us versus Them. The “Us” is me, you, and that guy who just flamed you on Facebook; the “Them” is EVERYONE in Washington, all of those professional politicians who, at the end of the day, are more concerned about keeping their jobs than doing anything meaningful for Us.
It is Us who are being affected by this whole mess, and it is critical that we remember that we are more alike to one another than we are different; black or white or yellow or red or freakin’ blue, it is Us who will have to stay home in isolation, or we will be the ones who are sent back to work despite the risks. What do we gain by choosing to fight one another over our political beliefs? All we do is continue the very divisiveness that works to the benefit of those trying to control us every day. It might be government by the people, but things are done by the bureaucrats acting at the behest of congresspeople or people in the White House, who, by and large, can work for home, or who will still be paid, virus or not. It is you and I who have to bear the brunt of social distancing, or the lack of adequate testing, or deal with conspiracy theorists who don’t think the virus is as bad as the left says it is (or those on the right who don’t think there is any shortage of medical supplies, for that matter). At the end of the day, all we have is each other.
So think about it. Sit down for a minute, and consider for yourself what it means to allow things to open up too early. People are going to die. Maybe not you and maybe not anyone you know, but then again, perhaps someone sitting across from you right now will succumb to this thing. Think about it from the old Skittles analogy: if there are 3 Skittles in one box that might kill you, do you want your kid to be eating out of that box? Is the risk small enough for you? If not, think again about whether you want to rush back out to get your hair done right now; might not affect you, but you could carry the virus home to your child or your spouse, and we have no way of knowing whether that store is taking proper precautions putting boxes of Skittles on their shelves. It’s not some grand conspiracy. There’s no Deep State. There’s me and you and everyone we know, and then there are the people in Washington who just want to make sure their numbers stay high–their poll numbers….They already think that this virus has killed less of us than expected, and so those in power are OK with that level of risk. Heck, they can spin it any way they want to.
But me and you–we have to live with each other.
