RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/coronavirus-vindicates-capitalism-11584659306

The left is never apt to let a serious crisis go to waste, as we see with its daily use of the coronavirus pandemic to bash the Republican administration. The bigger danger is the efforts it is already making to exploit the panic for its longer-term goal of destroying U.S. capitalism.

Socialist Bernie Sanders led the charge last Sunday in his Democratic primary debate with Joe Biden. Bernie rolled out his usual themes, this time through the virus lens. The pandemic “exposes the incredible weakness and dysfunctionality” of the U.S. health system, he said; the cure is centralized, socialized care. Americans can’t get the drugs they need because “a bunch of crooks” run drug companies, “ripping us off every single day.” The virus exposes the “cruelty and unjustness” of an economy that allows “big-money interests” and “multimillionaires” to profiteer off “working families.”

He’s hardly alone. The coronavirus has “laid this bare: America was less prepared for a pandemic than countries with a universal health system,” declared Vox. The pandemic has “inflicted new stress on a system already too unequal to function,” wrote Sarah Jones in New York magazine, lecturing on the need to “devolve power from wealthy interests.” “The coronavirus crisis exposes the stupidity of Trump’s healthcare policies,” railed Los Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik. A Morning Consult poll suggests this opportunistic sloganeering is resonating, with 41% of the public more likely to support universal health-care proposals amid this pandemic.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/03/coronavirus-pandemic-tests-american-society/#slide-1

Is American society ready for the coronavirus pandemic?

Afew months after September 11, 2001, David Brooks went back and looked at coverage of Pearl Harbor for an article in The Weekly Standard (“After Pearl Harbor,” December 10, 2001). What he saw intrigued him. A sense of unity and patriotism followed both surprise attacks. But media after Pearl Harbor had none of the sorrow, sensitivity, and angst that filled the news, with reason, after 9/11. Recognizing the inevitable costs of war, Americans on the home front at the outset of World War II were nonetheless eager to carry on as usual. They did not apologize or second-guess. They soldiered on. “When you step back and contemplate the range of post-Pearl Harbor media,” Brooks wrote, “you are struck by how extraordinarily proud of itself America then was.”

I revisited Brooks’s article this week while thinking about the differences between America during the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918–1919 and America during the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic today. Some of the distinctions are self-evident. America is far more wealthy, free, and technologically advanced than it was then. We enjoy the benefits of incorporating half the population into our economy and society, of ending de jure anti-black racism, of attracting the best and most ambitious talent from across the globe. We are no longer a rising power but a reluctant hegemon. A raw deal awaits any American who trades places with a doppelgänger from midway through Woodrow Wilson’s second term.

What changed is the American ethos. Expressive individualism replaced self-restraint. Narcissism and the therapeutic sensibility triumphed over the reticence and sense of tragedy that comes from living in places and times where there is no safety net and death is a constant presence. The culture of debunking, revisionism, and repudiation informs education, entertainment, art, and occasionally sport.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/03/20/what-happens-when-everything-stops/

Our ordinary lives and routines have been upended, but let’s see that as an opportunity to do some good even as we grapple with the very real challenges we’re all facing. It only seems like everything stopped. Life goes on.

The days after 9/11 were eerily quiet. There were no airplanes in the skies; they had been grounded. People were still in shock and waiting to see if another deadly attack would come. It didn’t, thank God, but the nation slowed down dramatically that week. And then we adapted and went back to living, albeit aware of a newly aggressive enemy.

But now much of the nation is under official or semi-official lockdown. Schools have sent students home for the year in many places. Professional and college sports have stopped. Concerts are canceled. The stock market is down more than 30 percent from it’s recent high. Even churches—the very place where people seek solace in times of crisis—have temporarily closed their doors, too.

And now all nonessential businesses are closed by government order in California, Illinois, New York, and a growing list of other states. Rumors are rife that the federal government will invoke the Stafford Act and declare effective martial law. I have no idea if that’s true, but it’s a rumor that is making the rounds so widely that you’ve probably already heard it.

Strange rumors and semi-plausible scenarios are what you get in uncertain times when people fear for their lives and their futures.

But what happens when everything stops?

Of course, not everything has stopped. The electricity is on. Water still comes out of your faucet. You can buy groceries, though there are spot shortages of key items. But it’s all of those nonessentials that make life sweet, right? So what now?