Opinion/Editorial
TO LIVE AND DIE IN IGNOMINY
THEY HAVE NO SKIN IN THE GAME.
The nation is currently being led by varied individuals of varying power, including politicians, medical experts, media titans and anchors, many governors, lieutenant governors, and so on. Even some mayors are fully in the game, but with the same lack of liability. The next time one of these people, or all of these people, recommend more shutdowns, more space between humans, fewer gatherings, closed restaurants, closed schools, and more, they need to have their careers ended.
Every one. They need to have their houses foreclosed on, right now. They need to be evicted (although certainly none of them rent). They need to have their cars repossessed. At the point that those things are accomplished, then the public might just start being able to really listen to them, and maybe, just maybe, believing in them again. Right now, these leaders, one and all are immune from any of what is happening to so much of the rest of the nation, and it’s not happening full bore just because of the virus. The virus isn’t killing America. It’s killing some of its citizens, but not anything like the 338 million citizens who call America their very own.
What’s killing America is an over-the-top reaction to this dreaded virus. This killing of America is not being called that. Oh, the rich, moneyed, and insulated will survive quite fine among what will one day soon be the ruins of the world so many have lived in, played in, and loved. No, this killing of America is being called fighting the virus. And there is no torturous behavior, monetary loss or drop-dead mental and physical failure too big not to ask the entire public to endure to wipe it out. They are being asked to do this by leaders, almost one and all, who have benefited mightily by this reaction to the virus and by giving the advice they have given so far. These leaders pay no personal or economic price and gain vastly in branding, name identity, and gaining more power and bigger reputations. This small newspaper, the Geneva Shore Report, by putting up this nearly unread Op/Ed, isn’t going to change anything.
The power of national media is just too well established and strong. The leaders are all entrenched and the few medical advisors all picked by them to dogmatically tell everyone that they are going to die if they don’t follow draconian rules…the rules that will eventually kill so many of them, and us.
Second, third, and fourth ‘waves’ of the virus are coming. Those comings are also political in nature now. This virus reaction should be about biology and science but instead, it’s fully become about politics. People reading this article will presume that the writer is a conservative when he is not. Those parts of the writer that lean conservative also are buttressed by how badly President Trump has handled the whole affair so far. There seems to be no stopping this dreadfully deadly train, on which America has mounted itself, as it charges headlong for an economic killing cliff that the nation has never envisioned, thought of, or even imagined could exist. And the train has a disabled demented engineer driving it. None of the leaders are going to be fired, have their stuff taken away, lose their homes or cars, or even private jets and limos. That’s not what happens to those people doing all the leading and advising right now.
How can these exalted and insulated leaders possibly have any idea of how a now unemployed mother, with two elementary-age kids, living (just the three of them) in a cheap rental, having not one dollar left at the end of that last payday, and nothing on the horizon to get them through, possibly understand? When this woman, and there are millions of them across this country, dies with her children, it will not be from the virus. It will be from something much more deadly, much older, and much more pervasive (if it is allowed to once again become pervasive, as it is being allowed to become again right now). It will come from starvation and exposure.
There will be no pictures in the Chicago Tribune, or the New York Times telling these citizen’s sad tales, like are being published all the time in those papers about people dying of the virus. No, these citizens, like the beating heart, straight spine, and brilliant mind of the USA, will die a death of ignominy, gone, and forgotten by a public more resembling hundreds of millions of trained seals rather than humans.
