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When Anyone Claims We Can’t…
I have seen a bunch of memes make the rounds along the following lines:
- When anyone claims we can’t afford a new government program…
- When anyone claims we can’t provide all Americans with free healthcare…
- When anyone claims we can’t provide work from home options…
Just remember we could do all the above during COVID-19.
In order to advance the cause, I’d like to offer my own additions to this list:
- When anyone claims we can’t and shouldn’t close the borders…
- When anyone claims we can’t do away with regulations around medical devices and treatments to fast track approval…
- When anyone claims we can’t shut down public schools and have everyone homeschool their kids…
- When anyone claims we can’t cancel all public entertainment like concerts and sporting events…
- When anyone claims we can’t shut down all “non-essential” businesses…
- When anyone claims we can’t create a police state forcing people to stay in their homes and present proof of identity when wandering outdoors…
- When anyone claims we can’t bring the economy to a screeching halt…
Just remember we could do all the above during COVID-19.
Have anything else to add?
Published in General
I think the next few years will be very instructive, as the price for the actions taken comes due. There are many things society can do, but when the cost is counted, anyone with a working brain will acknowledge that many are things society shouldn’t do.
I have liked the retort by @andrewklavan that doing something in an emergency does not validate doing that same thing as routine. He usually points to medical treatments such as [quotes are not exact, but I think they are consistent with the gist of Andrew’s comments], “just because we perform tracheotomies to insert breathing tubes during certain medical emergencies does not mean that we should routinely perform tracheotomies to insert breathing tubes into healthy people.” Or, “just because we have an intravenous tube inserted to supply nutrition during and after certain medical procedures does not mean that we should routinely walk around with IV tubes hanging out of our arms.”
The bill will come due. What bothers me is that we will somehow find a way to avoid paying it and pass it on to our children and grandchildren.
I’ll add to the list of “we can” —
A power hungry police captain in NYC can ticket truck drivers who are trying to get some shut eye, as well as having the goods in their semi’s hauled away:
https://defensemaven.io/bluelivesmatter/news/nypd-raids-sleeping-truck-drivers-tows-trucks-needed-to-haul-supplies-MmXFpc30U0WVJLR1FazLUA
There are others that mostly fall under the category of When anyone claims that the government can’t force people into destitution….
Many people, especially withing government, seen positively gleeful over the fact that they can pick and choose who gets to continue with their working life and who gets to have their lives ruined. Don’t tell me that the small business that someone has built up for their entire lives (restaurants, any service business you see at a local strip mall) or anyone who has been deemed “not essential” by our government bureaucrats will be able to start right up when those same government bureaucrats deem us no longer “not essential”. We are going to be seeing some “civil disobedience” around the corner. Who knows, maybe everybody in the media is right and anyone who contacts this virus will die. If so, I guess I better go back in my house (assuming I can live rent free) for the next year.
Perhaps more along the lines of the memes to which you were initially responding:
When someone claims we can’t work people like supermarket stockers or truck drivers or nurses for 12, 14, or 16 hour shifts . . .
When someone claims “I have to take my wife out to dinner” . . .
When someone claims “I have to go to work” . . .
When someone claims “We have to find extracurricular activities for our children” . . .
@ Full Size Tabby
Oh, but how many young Moms of my acquaintance fantasize about working from home. Could that not be a positive?
We haven’t yet established that even in an emergency we can provide the first two. It is not yet clear that what we are doing now won’t lead to a decade or more of economic depression, poverty, and the destruction of the most advanced healthcare system in the world. Most of the actions taken in the name of “fixing” the Great Depression actually prolonged that depression. How many of the new government programs and “free healthcare” that are being instituted today will make the current economic problems worse? We won’t really know for a long time.
As to the third, because those work from home options are currently so successful for the restaurant industry, dental hygienists, hair and nail stylists, sales people of various types, construction workers. And the universal success of remote workers is why industries have spent enormous amounts of money on workplace architecture that encourages people to meet and to share and develop ideas face to face.
That’s why I really hope we can keep a Republican in the White House and also at least one part of the Congress. Otherwise it will be Great Depression/2008 Recession all over again with an extended recovery – if one at all.