Ending The Lockdown Is Not Selfish Nor Cruel

Ending The Lockdown Is Not Selfish Nor Cruel

Ending The Lockdown Is Not Selfish Nor Cruel

Americans, especially Republicans, who want the lockdown ended yesterday have been labeled as selfish and cruel. That’s direct from the blue check scolding media, celebrities, and political elites.

A sampling of what I’ve observed across social media follows:

  • Ending the lockdown or refusing to wear a mask is wrong because you don’t have the right to risk someone else’s life.
  • Ending the lockdown just so you can reopen your hair salon, restaurant, clothing boutique is incredibly arrogant, selfish, and will endanger us all.

To be very blunt.

The lockdown has decimated our economy.  

As of this morning, from March to April, 20 million people lost their jobs. Never mind all that, keep the lockdown in place because REASONS! Lord & Taylor, BNSF Railway, Milgard Windows, restaurants, boutiques, oil fields, and more are all shut down. Permanently in some cases. 

The lockdown has cratered our supply chain. 

That’s ok. There’s a simple fix according to some “expert” on Facebook who said dairy farmers should just switch to making cheese and milk dumping will come to a halt.  

Texas, Florida, Colorado and other states have MOAR cases that magically happened the very day/week that businesses were allowed to open. Instant cause and effect! BULLSHIT. 

More testing, which is happening around the country, WILL end up identifying new cases. Does that mean every single person will die? Absolutely not. Does that mean those new cases magically came from the restaurant that is now operating at an unsustainable 20% capacity? No. 

The lockdown was NEVER intended to ensure the virus would just give up and go away. Furthermore, as Kim wrote, we are now finding out that this virus has been traveling around since early fall of 2019.

Yet when people talk about ending the lockdown, the crowd goes wild and not in a good way.

“We’re moving toward an utterly horrifying partisan divide, in which Democrats want to contain the virus so that we’re able to get the economy back on its feet, while Republicans decide that the only brave and manly thing to do is to stop worrying about the virus and “get back to normal” immediately, no matter how many Americans it kills. In fact, we may soon reach the point where dismissing all those deaths is precisely how you show your loyalty to Trump.”

Hey Paul? This has nothing to do with loyalty to Trump and everything to do with caring about the health and welfare of every American citizen. While you are telling us ending the lockdown will kill us all, the lockdown itself has caused the following: 

  1. Empty hospitals and thousands of furloughed medical personnel
  2. A significant increase in depression, suicides, and domestic abuse
  3. School children are suffering mentally and physically because one of their essential ways to learn and grow, in-person interaction with their peers and teachers, has been abruptly cut off. 
  4. People deferring or being told to defer medical appointments which is causing additional health problems.

Yet, those who are protesting the lockdowns are being painted as evil people who don’t care about human life. 

“Despite what the media claims, these protests against draconian stay-at-home orders, lockdowns, and closures aren’t simply based on the desire to get out of the house, get a haircut, and eat at one’s favorite restaurant. At the root, they’re based on perceived governmental overreach that doesn’t seem justified as data rolls in telling us the “enemy” isn’t all it has been cracked up to be.

Surely, even those who have lost their livelihoods and their freedoms in one fell swoop could understand and abide by measures, even draconian ones, that made sense in light of the best data available.”

Yes, about those models. The Imperial College model needs to be ripped to shreds and then burned to a crisp. Not only has it been completely wrong; the author of this shit, Neil Ferguson, got caught with his pants down. He of the ‘shut the entire world down to get rid of this virus’ broke his own rules multiple times. 

People who want to end the lockdown are being shamed into for their stance.

You know what S.E.?? I don’t accept ANY deaths of ANY kind. Yet there you sit, with a well-paying job, and lecture those who DON’T have a job. You insist the lockdown must stay in place. Know anyone in the NYC area with cancer? Guess what S.E.?  Appointment cancellations and no-shows are registering at 80% in the Northeast and there’s a 17% decline in chemotherapy in the same area. What are the rates across the country? I shudder to think. 

S.E., did you ever bother to realize that, should this lockdown continue, people will be gravely ill and dying from something other than this Wuhan lung rot? NOPE. Instead you are more interested in playing the ‘how dare you!!’ card. 

I grew up on a ranch. We saw life and death every damned day. Hard choices had to be made on multiple occasions. If a steer, cow, or calf got sick we doctored and even quarantined it if necessary. Did we quarantine the HEALTHY herd? Absolutely not. Did it hurt us monetarily if we had to put an animal down? Absolutely. Did we sacrifice the healthy livestock in order to save that one life? NO. As a rancher, I grew up with life’s realities. 

Advocating for this lockdown to end does not make any of us “Grandma Killers” nor does it make us selfish or cruel. 

Bill Maher, for all his snide asides regarding the Trump Administration, gets it.

This lockdown needs to end so we can SAVE lives. 

Feature Photo Credit: Geralt via Pixabay, cropped and modified

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10 Comments
  • Politically Ambidextrous says:

    The Left has this feudal idea that wealth is a static entity that can only be shifted around from one person to another. The idea that it is brains and work that solve other people’s problems creates value that leads to wealth is alien to them. If people are not working (because they are locked down or are incentivized not to work) and so are not creating the goods and services needed by others, what good is that “redistributed” money? Inflation, anyone?

    People need to read Francisco d’Anconia’s “money” speech from Atlas Shrugged.

    (OK, they really need to read the whole thing, but with attention spans being what they are, I’d settle for this one particular excerpt. The Story of the Twentieth Century Motor Company is my second choice. )

    • GWB says:

      I had a pretty good attention span when I read Atlas Shrugged, and I still couldn’t get through all of it without skipping some of the speeches. I actually would skip 5 pages or so ahead during the long pirate radio broadcast to see if it was over yet. Nope? Another 5 pages. It still took a while to get through it.

    • Tom T says:

      After our opposition to masks, we really need to focus on this shoe and shirt requirement in the stores. Hell! Why do we have to be required to wear clothes at all? Clothes are totalitarian requirement. I will not be marked as a serf!

  • GWB says:

    you don’t have the right to risk someone else’s life
    Oh good, so we’ll stop seeing you push for socialism in our gov’t, and for making lighter cars, and for ending robust electricity production, and overbearing regulations on drug research, and ending transportation of efficient fossil fuels to areas of need, and……. Right? Because you don’t have the right to risk someone else’s life, right?

    The lockdown has decimated our economy.
    Actually worse than that. (“Decimated” means 10% casualties, and we’re seeing more than 10% rise just in current unemployment.) (It doesn’t really mean “destroyed”.)

    dairy farmers should just switch to making cheese and milk dumping will come to a halt
    Well, technically that’s right. Since cheese is just moldy milk. So, let your milk sit around a while and voila! you have cheese! (*smh* While cheese is moldy milk product, there’s a lot more involved, and you’re talking a LOT of cheese.)

    More testing … WILL end up identifying new cases.
    And “new cases” is irrelevant if they don’t end up in the hospital or dying. Millions of folks have had it without even knowing about it. So, who cares. I hope we have LOTS of “new cases” so we can develop herd immunity.

    Democrats want to contain the virus so that we’re able to get the economy back on its feet
    No. They (the ones who are not actual tyrants, simply desiring to continue to stamp on their constituents’ faces, or the ones who just want to hurt Trump) really want to remove all risk. And that is not possible. So, Democrats want to live in an unreal world.

    no matter how many Americans it kills
    You know, bad faith assertions of evil on the part of your political enemy is very Hitler-like.
    Also, it depends entirely on how many Americans it kills. And we’re seeing that it’s not really killing all that many.
    OTOH, Democrats want to keep it locked down to prevent the virus from spreading, no matter how many people it kills.

    At the root, they’re based on
    That we’re under house arrest some places.
    Egad, I’m a big proponent of quarantines. But this is NOT a quarantine. It’s house arrest.

    should this lockdown continue, people will be gravely ill and dying from something other than this Wuhan lung rot
    Actually, even if we don’t continue the lockdown, people will be dying from other stuff. It’s called LIFE. You don’t get out of it alive. And, while I would like to prolong people’s life on this earth for various selfish and unselfish reasons, you’re not going to live forever.

    Aside from those who profit from creating panic (the media, politicians), and those who benefit from strangling the economy (politicians), and those who benefit from chaining the populace (politicians), the only other groups trying to keep us locked down are the fearful mobs and those who desire a risk-free life.

    For that last group, let me say that I am more than willing to provide you that risk-free life. All you have to do is give up all your freedom. And live in a padded cell with no contact with anyone (because you might offend them or be offended, or you might spread a disease) and eat your gruel 6 times a day (no, you can’t have any food other than a vitamin and calorie mush that has been overcooked – you might have an allergy, or the food preparer might have an allergy, or there might be a stray virus or e. coli bug in it, and we wouldn’t want you getting sick). I’m willing to pipe in a bit of African classical music (you wouldn’t want to be Euro-centric) at a very low volume for your entertainment, and a pretty picture of an outside – that would gladly kill you if it had the chance – that changes with the day and the seasons. THAT would be a risk-free life.

  • Here is an interesting article.

    http://ethicsalarms.com/2020/05/08/prelude-to-the-pandemic-creates-a-classic-and-difficult-ethics-conflict-but-the-resolution-is-clear-part-ii/

    One of the components of my research has been reading as many of the pro and con articles as I can stand. It is quite striking: the arguments for continuing the lockdown indefinitely are almost entirely authored by progressives, and are without exception characterized by bad logic, emotionalism, manipulated facts, biased analysis, fearmongering, and suspect motives. The majority of the arguments for opening up the economy soon are markedly more logical, unemotional, and based on sound statistics and analysis. Certainly one cannot choose between two options based on the quality of the advocates for each. Nonetheless, the divide is striking.

  • The economic destruction from the lock down kills people. Betsy McCaughey of the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths calculates 77,000 excess deaths from suicide and substance abuse alone, using historical data and the St. Louis Fed’s prediction of 32% unemployment. Harvard economist Gregory Mankiw cites in his macro text research showing that a 1% increase in U.S. long term unemployment results in 37,000 excess deaths when additional causes are included — domestic violence, stress, heart attacks, etc. A 2012 paper in the “American Journal of Public Health” by Christopher McCleod et al. found that becoming unemployed more than doubles the risk of dying for low and medium skilled American workers (risk increases 140%, in fact). A 2016 study using EU data by Harvey Brenner (U N. Texas Health Center & Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health) found that unemployment quickly raises a person’s risk of death from heart attack, followed later by increased mortality risk from stroke.

    When governors shut down economies, they kill people. They are making a tradeoff between deaths from COVID19 and deaths from economic damage their policies are causing. Governors need to weigh this scale of deaths very carefully if they shut things down, because they genuinely are choosing to kill people.

    I have no sympathy at all for lock down proponents who claim they care about lives while opponents don’t Advocates of lock down are proponents of killing people, and need to be disillusioned firmly. Maybe ferociously.

    McCaughey: http://betsymccaughey.com/we-must-count-the-deaths-from-shutdowns-as-well-as-from-coronavirus/

    McCleod et al.: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3464820/

    Mankiw (reference): https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/may/6/allow-michigan-to-reopen/

    Brenner: https://ec.europa.eu/social/main.jsp?catId=738&langId=en&pubId=7909&furtherPubs=yes

  • Norm says:

    It’s fair to assume that the author of “Republican’s now want us to embrace mass death” is not arguing in good faith. You can find the same article on MSN.com if you don’t have a wapo account – it’s basically a laundry list of the latest DNC talking point, trying to re-frame the situation as worse than ever, because the lockdowns work.

    But now it’s the Democrats who are trying to save the economy, from the Republicans, Because if we allow anyone out of lockdown, so many people will die that the economy won’t be able to start and society will collapse – I’m not kidding. That’s their latest.

  • Harvard Fong says:

    Oddly enough, we’ve been running an experiment as to what happens when we cease the “lockdown”; its called “letting the essential (expendable) works do their jobs to bring we in the chattering classes our heating fuel, electricity, potable water, food items, telecommunications etc.etc.etc.”. None of these dramatic dipwads like Paul W. seem to be overly concerned for those keeping the nation afloat and their dumbazzes in relative comfort. So for some unknown reason, it is okay for the essential (expendable) to work but not for the workers in bookstores, restaurants, clothes stores, movie theater, to do their jobs, using the agreed upon device to reduce exposure (i.e. some kind of respiratory mask). By the by, if you wear the mask why do you need the physical distancing? And contra-wise, if you have the engineering exposure control (Plexiglass barriers) why the need for PPE? I guess all my training and experience as an industrial hygienist don’t mean squat when the great minds like Paul W. are on the job.

  • SteveS says:

    Worse than decimated the nation’s economy, it tercerted it.

    Worried that the release of restrictions will lead to deaths? Then keep yourself isolated; refuse to patronize businesses which don’t require masking; keep your distance from any and all other people to your heat’s content. If you do not want to be released, then keep yourself imprisoned.

    Meanwhile, I shall be free.

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