The Partisan Divide on Issues

[pbrower2a]

(08-15-2020, 02:35 AM)Classic-Xer Wrote:

(08-14-2020, 11:47 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: Two or three months of economic hardship would be a suitable cost for saving, so far, 170 thousand deaths. Just under 406,000 Americans died of war-related causes in World War II, and that was over three years. Americans underwent great hardships to prevent an Axis victory, something that many European and Asian countries got to experience a taste of. We had a near-shutdown in Michigan and we got some stability. There was no place to go except to drive-up windows, gas stations, and basically food stores.  It was a lonely, boring, frustrating time. To find entertainment one had to rely upon oneself. But just think of how awful life is in a ventilator. 

Nobody can find any noble purpose in 170 thousand deaths. We are not overthrowing the yoke of a despotic King. We are not emancipating slaves. We are not making the world safe for democracy or thwarting genocide. 

We needed some flexibility on the time, which would have been easier if we had some genuine leadership at the apex of power instead of... but to go further I repeat myself.  

We are in a Crisis, and this epidemic is a Crisis because it will shake the assumptions that people have gotten if they are even elementary-level children.

Nope, we are dealing with a foreign bug that a Chinese Communist State failed to isolate and contain and inform us and the world about early on.

The deaths are heavily American. It is our problem now. Some State governors did a good job of meeting the disease, but our President got in the way. China closed off the afflicted area, but Trump made the response largely a state option. The private sector, both for-profit and not-for profit (in the latter, such includes the Roman Catholic Church and mainline Protestant denominations) met their tasks well. The NHL and NBA ended their seasons early. Lessons from other countries were good warnings. Religious processions were particularly infamous for spreading the virus because those often attract sick people. Such explains Italy and Iran... it is telling that Saudi Arabia cancelled the Hajj. 

There have been spreader events such as some megachurch services in which the hack pastor tells people that God is enough to save people from the virus, protests against the lockdowns, funerals, and even a Trump rally (most infamously in Tulsa. Herman Cain got infected there and eventually died). Most recent of dumb events to attend was the big motorcycle rally in Sturgis, South Dakota. You can be sure that there will be nothing of the kind in Sturgis, Michigan, which typically has events that piggyback on that one. Let's put it this way... if you will be in the market for a good late-model Harley-Davidson motorcycle in a few months, plenty will be available at unusually modest prices because their owners went to the big motorcycle convention. Worse, they will have transmitted COVID-19 to people who had nothing to do with the big motorcycle rally.  

It's well past time to blame the People's Republic of China. We were doing much wrong before COVID-19 struck, fostering an economic order that seems to maximize economic inequality on behalf of elites as arrogant as feudal lords of the late-medieval and early-modern era authorizing news media to sell out to commercial interests while pretending to be objective purveyors of information, debasing public K-12 education into training for dead-end jobs in which seemingly only people with borderline retardation could be happy. The super-rich seemingly have no responsibility unless they kill (Phil Specter) or rape (Weinstein, Epstein, and Cosby, which is not a law firm), and the rest of us are responsible to the super-rich. 

We were told that the key to prosperity was that if we would suffer for the elites through lower wages, higher rents, more monopolization, easier availability of propaganda on behalf of pure plutocracy, and support of the political lackeys of the Master Class, then we too would prosper. If Robert Heinlein related that the proper image of the Soviet Union was of a drunk, the proper image of America might now be a homeless person. A trend that began about forty years ago has reached its preposterous conclusion -- and great tragedy.