My first point of confusion is found in their willingness to sacrifice my life on the altar of their wallet. We all want to be able to work and play safely, but these protests are giving the coronavirus transmission opportunities that will only make matters worse.
My second point of confusion is found in their comparative valuation of life more broadly when they are willing to sacrifice me, but they oppose a women’s right to choose. If life starts at the moment of conception, surely it must extend until the moment of natural death. Death from covid-19 today is a death that has been facilitated, in part, by incompetence by our elected governmental officials – all of them. Both sides pull as hard as they can on the rope to find a bipartisan end to their political tug of war when we need them to put the rope down and find a non-partisan American outcome.
My third point of confusion is found in the clear and selfish actions of capitalists at all levels, big and small, to put taxpayer dollars that were supposed to help our American economy remain viable into their owner’s wallet rather than into their employees wallet where it was intended to go. Do we really all agree that “greed is good?” Surely, some of us are trying to walk a less greedy path through life – are we in the minority?
My fourth point of confusion is found all around us. Our stay at home goals have only been in place for a few weeks and we can already see that our roads are less congested in part by the ability of many of our essential workers to work from home. Our stay at home goals have resulted in our ability to see mountains that we haven’t seen in years and we can leave our eye drops in the medicine chest because our eyes aren’t itching. We see that our current actions are a benefit to our quality of life and yet we long to return to the ways of pollution and environmental destruction.
My fifth point of confusion is found in our economic management practices. We are suffering from a variety of inventory shortages in essential equipment necessary for the safety of our frontline responders because we consciously chose to pursue a “just in time” inventory management philosophy when we had no idea of what time we would need those products. How could we have been so blind to the obvious outcome this practice would lead us to? And, how did we not recognize that a global pandemic would create global demands on our global critical supply chains that could not be met by the minimally configured global manufacturing suppliers? We seem to have pared down our supply side to the point that it can’t even meet the needs of the countries where they operate.
I am confused by what I see all around me. I can’t seem to find any firm footing in a way of life that is nothing like the one we had as we welcomed the arrival of 2020 just a few months ago. This pandemic has caused us to see that changes are part of our reality and we didn’t see them coming. The question we must all answer is this – will we collectively embrace the smarter choices and reject the dumber ones? I have always followed the philosophy that stupidity does not set a precedent.
The Sausage Grinder is Broken, will you help to fix it?
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