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Oceanside Pier, thirty seconds

Friday, May 1, 2020

Oncoming truck


I think that I post this cartoon about once a year. So dang true. I was reading about Paris, Texas today. Everything was going along so swimmingly in the rural Lamar County town, made famous by the eponymous movie. And then "boom!" The outbreak hit. Previously invulnerable, now they are looking for firm ground.

Unfortunately it is a scenario that is repeating throughout the heartland. I wrote about South Dakota and the danger they were in with their policies about ten days before tragedy struck. When it finally did, a commenter accused me of being exultant. Au contraire. Extremely sad really. And tragic.

Because I believe that the inevitability of the awful circumstances could have been somewhat avoided or mitigated if Noem had used some common sense and directed the state to shelter in place. But the heartland evidently thought it had some super powers that gave it teflon skin and protection against such things.

Texas is opening up today. Talk about timing. Yesterday was the deadliest day of the pandemic in Texas.
Texas on Thursday experienced its deadliest day of the coronavirus pandemic, reporting 50 new deaths just one day before Gov. Greg Abbott's (R) stay-at-home order was set to expire as the Lone Star State hopes to begin reopening its economy.
Also on Thursday, the state reported 1,033 new cases of COVID-19, the first time the daily rise of new cases has exceeded 1,000 since April 10.
Texas has a population of almost 30 million but has only administered 330,300 coronavirus tests, of which 28,087 have been positive. 
But they will go blindly forward and open up because the economic engine must be stoked and most of the mortality is going to be old people and they've outlived their usefulness already, haven't they?

Rep. Kevin McCathy, who is a noob if I have ever seen one, said that Americans crave liberty and freedom on Hannity the other night. He is right. So do toddlers. But there are times it is not safe to let them out of the crib or give them the keys to the family car. I don't think we are done learning our painful lessons from this one yet.

1 comment:

Jon Harwood said...

We are getting an enormous social/medical experiment. It will be enlightening to see how this goes in the loose states vs the strict ones in about two weeks to a month. None of it will be pretty and with our election year in progress we have close to zero chance of learning from the experiment. The one outcome you can count on is each "side" claiming the results prove they were right. The fasten seat belt light is on.