🚨 BREAKING 🚨
— World Health Organization (WHO) (@WHO) March 11, 2020
"We have therefore made the assessment that #COVID19 can be characterized as a pandemic"-@DrTedros #coronavirus pic.twitter.com/JqdsM2051A
It likely could have been designated a pandemic weeks earlier had China been forthright about the severity of the coronavirus outbreak within their country (The WHO was also complicit in allowing this to get out of control).
I was traveling home from a family vacation in Arizona when this announcement was made. I remember how eerily quiet it was in the Phoenix airport, as if the first casualty of the pandemic was air travel. Within two weeks of that designation, I was working my day job from home. Then a couple of weeks after that I was hosting my weekly radio program from the confines of my house. For someone who considers himself the proverbial social butterfly, it was a difficult adjustment. However, I was grateful to be gainfully employed considering how so many businesses were shut down within days of the start of the pandemic.
While my wife and I never suffered financially (heck, we even came out ahead given the savings on commuting expenses), I was heartsick over the job losses, financial ruin and deteriorating mental health so many people endured. As a political conservative, I also came to grips with the sad fact that pining for an era of small government was starting to become an exercise in futility given the nearly $5 trillion spent on various "COVID relief packages" over the past 12 months. To hear people ecstatic over "free money" means that they'll continue to vote for political candidates who vow to keep that gravy train a runnin'. And when it comes to our basic liberties, those will never return once government succeeds in chipping away at even a fraction of them. Even as we reach herd immunity in the U.S., our betters are never going to proclaim "olly olly oxen free." It's going to have to be up to we the people to draw that proverbial line in the sand. Problem is, I'm not certain there are enough U.S. citizens with the will or desire to make that clean break from Quarantine Daddy.
Yep, a good crisis definitely has not gone to waste.
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