DATELINE: Home, USA

It is an incompetent general who deploys tactics to win a battle that will ultimately lead to losing the war. In war or in virus-fighting, misguided battle decisions happen because leaders are focused on the wrong thing, in the case of the current virus it’s deciding to prioritize quantity over quality.

Longevity is not life’s objective.

It seems logical to manipulate society to save lives, but to what end? In a democracy, citizens can never be deprived of the right to decide for themselves the personal balance between prudence and acceptable risk. By allowing the government to relegate us to our houses, or more importantly, completely shutdown our economy, we have yielded way too much of the ground that our forefathers bled to gain.

We will soon enter into a self-inflicted recession. This is a step too far, an example of a battle tactic that loses the war, of a medical treatment that kills the patient.

So you hunker down for 30, 60, 90 days or more. You manage to survive. Now what? Your community is devasted, small businesses have closed and won’t come back. Employees in small- to mid-sized companies were laid of months ago, and money saved is long since spent. The retirement funds of everyone you know are absolutely devasted. The life-long pursuits of Baby Boomers are entirely fucked.

What are the things that make life worth living? People will say, “At least we’re still alive.” Is that what it’s come down to? Is that where we set the bar for our lives, mere existence?

I say fuck that. Life is for the living, it should not be wasted cowering in the basement. The People make the decisions for their lives not politicians. The assumption is that a lot of people will act irresponsibly (although our national history is full of examples of average citizens doing the right thing in a crisis), and therefore, the government needs to make all life choices for us. That just simply can’t happen. In California at least our democratic government is unworthy and unqualified.

We need to turn the economy back on right now and let individual citizens decide for themselves the definition of acceptable risk. That’s how a democracy should work.

Saving lives by infringing on individual rights won’t mean shit if it results in millions of citizens losing the quality of life that the American ideal is based on.

Photo on VisualHunt