Sunday, May 3, 2020

coronavirus part IV

I promised to keep my mouth shut about this whole mess but I can't resist. It's pretty much public record. I feel badly for all the people who lost their stores, lost their jobs, lost their income, everything.

It's here now, and supposedly got here through a preschool, but it was only a matter of time before it slipped in at Allsups or some other place. People are deadly afraid and I don't blame them. It's a horrible disease.

On the other hand others are so pissed off at the governor, they're ready to go do some damage in Santa Fe or haul off on social media like she's some kind of demon fixing to take our rights away and lock us up. No, I think she's trying to keep the number of deaths down. Yes, that's causing a lot of hurt to a lot of people and their jobs. There is no way out of this without hurting someone.

I personally do not believe that she is an evil one-world rights-snatching dictator, and I also believe that Trump is an inept fool or we wouldn't be in this pickle. But in any case I'm one of the twenty or thirty percent who don't have to leave home and who are not all that inconvenienced by a lockdown. I have two jobs and they're both online, and I don't rely on them anyway as I'm retired and we pretty much wrapped it up before we got here. We consider ourselves vulnerable and with four kids to raise. So we're grateful that any set of circumstances would allow us to stay home way out in the country, and avoid the whole mess.

So I'll tell you, it's changed our lifestyle quite a bit. Lots less Allsups, lots less theater, and places we just won't go anymore. You can open them up like they're doing in Texas but about 30% of us, I figure, just won't go. We are the 30% who value our lives enough to do whatever's necessary to ride out the storm.

I don't mean the other people don't value their lives. They just want to go about living them as usual and not worry about some stupid virus. But I'll tell you, there's no "usual" if 30% of us are staying home. And it's not Trump's fault, except that he was enough of an idiot to let it in and let it ravage our population, before he figured out what "testing" or "contact tracing" was. He still doesn't know, really, and doesn't mind talking out his hat when he knows he's stumped. But I'm not swallowing bleach, and I'm not going for hydroxychloroquine, or whatever that stuff was. He said it was a game changer, but his game hasn't been changing.

You can get mad all you want, but we're in a new depression. I think things that will help us get through this depression are good, and the rest of it, let it go. If you were a bus driver, forget it. They had to throw six or seven trillion at this and as usual, the rich gobbled it all up, so it's all in the Bahamas now, and it isn't coming back. The rest of us will have to scrape up crumbs or whatever. And your tourist store on Burro Street? I think they set that back a few years, if you're even able to open. The governor didn't do you in, the 30% of us who aren't budging will do you in. We wouldn't care if the Governor opened Burro Street tomorrow. We still wouldn't go. And those poor folks who were working in the meat plants - well, they weren't coming up to Burro Street anyway. Neither were those oil boys. Those guys are all boom and bust anyway, and now it's bust, and they'll be around trying to bust something. It won't be pretty.

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