April 2020 will go down in history as one extremely long painful monotonous nightmare—more so in places like New York City than all the thousands of cities and locales elsewhere in the vast territory of the United States of America, but for all of us the worst financial crisis of our lifetimes. Why? Why did everybody have to stay home and either work online or not work at all? Health experts predicted a deadly pandemic for which American hospitals and cities were unprepared. By year’s end 2019, all eyes were on China’s clandestine handling of the fast-spreading COVID-19 or the novel coronavirus. Americans thought mistakenly that it couldn’t happen here. The entire U.S. economy shut down to save some lives and prevent for the most part big-city hospitals from being overrun with the latest contagion? That is exactly what ended up happening—except without all the drama across the nation, just in NYC and similar huge metropolises, congested American cities like the ones we’re used to watching in TV dramas.
President Donald Trump, in a total about-face given his usual response to zig while government zags, ultimately decided to go with ‘the science’ and agreed to the slow down and eventual shut down of every aspect of American work in commerce, education and government save ‘essential’ services. Notice all those in power—including corporations who pay for the daily TV ads promoting how we still need to eat restaurant meals or how our isolation has brought us together through the internet and our devices (not a single reference to old-fashioned phone calls)—perceive a month or two of personal lost income as no big deal, even the President. They have the resources to survive a financial setback. But not the American people, the vast majority living paycheck to paycheck, every dollar relied upon to balance a monthly budget of mortgage or rent, groceries, medications, insurance, utilities, bills and life’s incidentals.
And the President thinks Americans who finally started protesting at their state capitols and city halls have cabin fever? No, sir, they are people millionaires and billionaires do not understand. Americans actually want to pay their bills. Their greatest fear is losing their home, cars and everything. The stay-home-stay-safe mandate was the worst mistake made by government at all levels. Americans were not asked what they thought, if they were willing to risk their health and their families if they continued working during a pandemic. Americans would have answered, “Hell, yeah! Let’s do it! Anything to earn a paycheck.” Hospital administrators and virus scientists sounded the alarm of a pandemic that potentially could kill millions of Americans and make tens of millions sick. But that is not what happened, and it is not what is going to happen. We see that now.
Along for the ride
The mass media went along with presenting the practical advice and educated assumptions from medical science circles to practice common-sense health guidelines to avoid the coronavirus (stay home, wash hands, avoid crowds). In spotlighting what the medical experts have to say about avoiding this illness, cable and even local TV have presented nothing but coronavirus news 24-hours-a-day. Fine for the first two weeks but then overkill and by now unnecessary. Just today one of the top cable news networks included a non-coronavirus news story, this one about a missing woman. Life, the good and bad, did not stop just because of a pandemic. But to hear the media tell it, it did. The national news, made up of professional journalists, have covered every angle, the same angles, of the pandemic ad nauseum.
But one angle the big-time media missed goes along with their failure to predict Donald Trump would win the presidency. This time they missed the American workers’ perspective during a pandemic, which is not an uncommon health crisis, not our first rodeo. Americans want to go back to work, go back to earning money. Hell, they never wanted to stop working. Americans did not want to stay home to avoid getting sick or perchance infect their loved ones or others. If asked, they would do anything to keep a job: work six feet apart, wear masks, permit temperature checks, go directly home after work, even accept a lower wage and shorter hours especially if temporary. By now a couple hundred million Americans are realizing their rights were trampled even if temporarily and with the best of intentions. The lawsuits will come as America is the most litigious nation in the world. People will sue over their child’s missed education, their family’s missed income and inability to pay bills, even their misdiagnoses whether positive or negative coronavirus or their other infections and ailments sidelined due to the red alert for COVID-19.
Hindsight is 20/20. While a world-class nation like Sweden carried on sans panic by allowing citizens to choose sheltering at home or continue working during the pandemic, the USA was caught pants down with no pandemic preparation (sorely lacking abundant medical supplies, respiratory equipment and emergency field hospitals). No, instead, for some convoluted reason, our nation chose the worst-case scenario to close the entire economy, half of which is from small businesses, and send out billions of dollars in stimulus checks and business loans. Why? Why was the greatest, strongest, most prosperous nation on earth caught off guard and ill-prepared to carry on during another pandemic? The national media and talking heads covered that already. And it doesn’t help for President Trump to lead daily briefings on the pandemic with antagonistic quips to national reporters there to cover it.
We got it. We’re in heap big trouble. We’re reminded every day on the news and online. Tens of millions of American workers have applied for unemployment because their jobs aren’t coming back. Some financial experts predict an economic depression. Many small businesses are closed for good not because of the pandemic but because of how government handled the pandemic: convincing everyone to stay home for the sake of their loved ones and forcing everyone to stop the spread.
Well, the daily numbers indicate a job well done, best that could be expected, much better actually. This pandemic is mild compared to the Spanish flu of 1918 which took the lives of 50 million worldwide and in the U.S. less than one million dead. Even a hundred years ago, Americans during that pandemic had to wear masks to avoid contracting the flu. That was fair. And they kept working, too. Maybe the spread and death were high because everyone continued working. Times were so different then. People didn’t need much. Probably everybody had no health insurance. Life was less complex. And there was no flu vaccine, still today only used by less than half the U.S. population.
Compared to today, it’s not why but how, with all our collective intelligence in this 21st century high tech age, did we go off the rails in dealing with a pandemic? It’s bat crazy from the top down. And that is what all the protests are about. Americans are not foolish or stupid about health, new viruses and pandemics. If you’re gonna survive in this country, hell on the planet, you take chances every day. The Swedes understand about building a tolerance to a new virus, that life is survival of the fittest and some will die but not everyone, not the majority. Americans are willing to do whatever it takes to work and apparently to just survive. The way this turned out is why so many Americans, 70 percent without a college education, are suspicious of the highly educated and distrustful of the government. Lots of lessons here all the way around.