LMK5 said:
To me, the sad sights are the stadiums that are needlessly empty. Like in any battle, somebody has to be the first to poke their head out of the foxhole and lead the way. It sure ain't gonna be a Californian. Never heard of the Daytona 500, or the Super Bowl, or the resulting celebration leading to an outbreak, and we certainly would have heard about it if it occurred.
What are you talking about? I know that Trump taught you to think of everything as a war against people who aren't Republicans, but that's not literally true. We aren't in a war, we are dealing with risk.
In the 80's did you tell people that we were in a war with AIDS and that somebody had to stop wearing condoms to lead the way? When people realized Asbestos was cancerous, did you tell people dealing with friable asbestos to stop wearing marks and PPE to lead the way? What about for smoking? What about for any other known health risks that can be readily dealt with?
I'm not happy about the fact that people can't resume pre-pandemic life yet, but what makes me really said is the 500k American excess deaths in 2020 alone and the ~200k more that have died so far this year. Rather than pretending that this is a literal war where we are fighting against a real enemy for a specific cause, we should treat this as it actually is: a public health emergency that demands coordinated, reasonable precautions. Every time a population group chooses to forgo precautions, it increases the chances COVID will flourish in that community. Because we are collectively half-assing it as a country, due in large part to our American culture, COVID has remained too big of a problem for too long.
So rather than feeling sad because stadiums have been fallow for 12 months, how about we focus on what it will take to allow stadiums to be safely packed as soon as possible. The answer has always been to defeat the pandemic, not to just pretend it doesn't exist. Difficult real-world problems often require self-sacrifice and hard work. I know that is anathema to much of our country, but we needed to rise to the occasion. Unfortunately, not enough of us have and we are where we are.
Before this is all said and done we are likely to lose in the neighborhood of 1m Americans to this pandemic (assuming that the vaccines actually work as well as we think they do and the pandemic doesn't become an evergreen public health problem), and most of those deaths will have been unnecessary.