The Coronavirus War

Here’s an interesting thing about our war against Coronavirus and the problems it is causing our nation. It really is a war.

Now you may not think that is much of an insight on my part. After all, everyone from the President to our Governor (I live in New York state, for those readers who are from somewhere else) to the Mayor of New York City tell us almost daily that we are at war against the virus.

It has many of the trappings of war. Dislocation, disruption, hardship on the general population and death. A lot of death.

But I want to take a minute or two to look at a few things that make this war against Coronavirus very different than other wars, and some that make it very much the same. These are things we really should know, especially with an election coming up.

First, just like World War II, it is a war that is having an impact on the whole country. Everyone made sacrifices then, including millions of men who were drafted. There was rationing. And full employment, too. While the Army and the Navy grew and grew, millions more men and women found jobs in factories making war materials.

But this war is different. We do have rationing of sorts, but that’s just because Costco doesn’t have enough toilet paper or meat, and it’s only temporary. Most of us are sacrificing by staying home, and it has generated a rising tide of protest. People are demanding the right to “open up the economy” and get back to work.

You know, just like the thousands of armed protesters who stormed the factories in Detroit after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, demanding the assembly lines that were converted to making tanks and airplanes go right back to producing cars. “It’s our Constitutional right to drive freely,” they chanted.

Oh, wait. They didn’t. I guess the Greatest Generation didn’t really understand our Constitution.
And there are casualties caused by our government’s failure to act when the virus was first detected. We have just about caught up on getting the supplies we need to treat patients, but we still aren’t close to getting the tests we need to detect the illness in people.

To put it simply for the fake news believers, there aren’t enough tests to go around, and the tests we have aren’t accurate enough. They have too many false positives - they say someone is sick when they really aren’t - and too many false negatives. That means the test says you aren’t sick when you are, and you are then free to go around without symptoms and spread the disease.

Then there are the casualties. More than 58,000 American soldiers died in Vietnam between 1960 and 1975. So far, more than 80,000 people have died because of Coronavirus since January.

With so much death, It is surprising that even the radical fringe is pressing so hard to get everyone back to work - you know, get back to where we were when people started to die.

Of course, if you ask them, those protesters - heck, we can add lots of Republicans in Congress and elected office across the nation -say they want us to go back to work safely and fast.

Some of them question the figures - in truth, there were no tests to give to all the dead bodies when the virus was ravaging our big cities - and say it proves we can go back to work safely.

Strangely, they haven’t said how to do it. Maybe I missed it, or maybe they just discussed it among themselves - a secret plan to disclose a week before the election comes to mind.

But, before we put millions more people at risk, we just might want to ask those supporters of re-opening the economy just how they would do it, and what the price will be.

Now I know some businesses are failing, and more will never come back. Which is what happens in war. Rarely in America, because the fighting rarely took place here - except for some skirmishes around Alaska and some ineffective fire-bombing by Japanese Fu-Go balloon bombs on the west coast - but all over Europe during World War II, all over Vietnam during the long battle there, all over Europe again after World War I, all over the South during the Civil War - well, you get the idea.

War is Hell. It is not something you want to get into unless you have no other choice. Which, to be clear, does not mean giving Adolph Hitler everything he wanted or giving Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin everything he wants.

Now to my final point on why the Coronavirus  War is like a lot of other big wars. Wars change the nations that fight them, and big wars change things in big ways.

Lot of people die, which changes everything for their families. Lots of businesses close and never come back. Lots of babies are also born, which gives you a demographic change that takes generations to deal with.

Huh? I mean what happened all across the country after the post-World War II baby boom. All those schools that were built, all those people who went into teaching, all those pensions for retired teachers and closed buildings that had to be sold off.

And, oh yes, all that new technology and changes in the work force.

Look at the movies made in the years after World War II, and after Korea, and all through the Vietnam War and you can see clearly how America dealt with the cultural changes that were caused by those climactic battles.

Amazingly, few people noticed it at the time. Everyone likes to think that when the war is over, we as a nation can get back to normal. And yet, everything was changing.

Normal was one of the casualties of this Coronavirus War. And I don’t think we will go back.

Normal was about 44 million people in this country having no health insurance, and another 38 million having inadequate health insurance.

Normal was about 70 percent of Americans having less than $1,000 in savings according to a survey by GOBankingRates. It sowed 45 percent of the people surveyed had nothing saved at all.

Normal was praising, heck worshiping, people who were able to become billionaires by dint of their hard work and energy and creativity, without mentioning how all that money came to them under a tax structure that let them accumulate millions and millions of dollars without paying any taxes.

You know, just like Donald Trump.