Dan Zak wrote a good piece in The Washington Post today. The first few paragraphs sum up the idea that although the pandemic is not over, Americans are over it. It has a very last-days-of-Rome vibe to it. We are no longer a nation that sacrifices or does without. Two months of quarantine and we want to go back to our ways - the summer barbecues, the trips to the beach, bar hopping - all the banalities of modern life. I read a lot of history books. One I read recently, The Splendid and the Vile, talks about England during the Blitz, when the Nazis basically tried to bomb the country into submission. Now *that* was sacrifice, but god forbid we are denied our inalienable right to dying our hair or eating a Big Mac. It is beyond stupid.
Of course, when its written about in the press, the failures are elided, the idea that 100,000 people died is just taken as a given, not a preventable disaster. By the same token, the trillions shoveled into the economy could have been done differently and in a way that did not spike unemployment to well past 20 percent. And, there are things that could be done *now* that mitigate damage yet untold. But we are clearly no longer a deferred gratification nation, no, we will fight for our right to party in Lake of the Ozarks because hey, why worry about the risk I might pose to others even if *I* do not get sick and die? Trump has given up (if he ever cared) and governors have decided (or realized) that at this point, the best they can do is encourage the masks and social distancing and the hand washing, test who they can, and hope for the best because people want this to be over even if it is not. This is America in 2020.
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