quote Originally posted by MadMark: I am certainly surprised by your response here maryjane. I will try to answer what you have posted in some semblance of order. First: "So, you're advocating putting everyone back to work and letting the chips fall?" No I am not. That is a gross distortion of what I have said so far. There are areas of this country that are badly infected and a whole lot that are not. It is not and cannot be a black and white solution. There has to different ways to deal with it for the various areas. Second: "You get to pick the 20,000 that are going to die and inform their families." No not at all. Who dies and who lives as always depends not on me or you, but on God, in my case, or fate, or the devil, or whatever you think causes death in this world every day. That is not going to change. I have a question to ask you then. At what point do you suggest we go back to work? At what point is it alright to let some die so all the rest may live? Is it 1000 deaths in a year? 100 deaths in a year? 10 deaths in a year? Or can we not suffer one death in a year due to this virus? Going along with that, whatever point you pick how long will it take to get there? Another week? A month? A year? 10 years? How long can we as a country sustain that? And as a world too? How long before our infrastructure dies out? How long before the suicides exceed the death rate of the virus? How long before we can live free again? Third: "As far as Ican discern, all this distancing and temporarily closed businesses began not quite 3 weeks ago. We have military that have been deploying to hellish places all over the mideast living in conditions that most of us would find deplorable..while getting shot at too and even those that aren't, are often at sea for months, or in countries with a lot less than what we have here. My own parents went thru both the great depression and the rationing of WW2 without blinking an eye and we as a nation can't even make it 3 weeks of not working, or eating out at our favorite restaurants and doing without extra toilet paper without being ready to sacrifice 20,000 of our fellow citizens? And we have the nerve to castigate millennials for living with their parents? They aren't the pussies...we are. We think this is the greatest country on Earth and we can't make the smallest of sacrifices?" You certainly packed a lot in this one. You talk about service to country. Well, sir you are not the only one who has served. I have too. I put my life on the line too. And there are hundreds of thousands of American youth to middle age who are now serving. They don't get to decide to isolate and hide from the virus. Do you really think that an air craft carrier with over 3500 of our young men and women on it can isolate and keep away from each other like we are told to? Already we have heard of cases of this virus on board one of our air craft carriers and now the military has shut down information about how many and where the affected are, because it makes sense to not inform our enemies if we have a problem. After all you have seen in your 70 plus years, you really think China, or Russia or Iran or many other groups and countries would not take advantage our temporary weakness? I certainly don't trust our historical enemies. Do you? As to the depression, my parents both went through it too. And no one that I know of is advocating we just blatantly give up and completely return to work today. So that is a distortion to the reality of what we face. Like I said before it is not an either or proposition. It is not just 3 weeks, going by what you have said here we continue on indefinitely. As to your reference to 20,000 of your fellow citizens, have we not suffered that kind of loss every year? More than that have died this year alone due to the regular flu. Why are we so much more afraid of this Covid-19 flu? Are we that much of, in your words, pussies that we cannot carry on? And speaking of sacrifices, is it a sacrifice to sit at home on our butts, while our world and the economy falls down around us? How do we recover if our whole world goes into a steep depression? And wars break out? And our infrastructure is destroyed? How many people will die if we do not get back to work fairly soon? Can you even count that toll? Just at what point do you suggest we get out of our trenches and attack this problem? Do we have to wait until the government can guarantee that no one will die from Covid-19? I certainly don't think that is a viable or reasonable thing to do. Finally: "We think this is the greatest country on Earth and we can't make the smallest of sacrifices? When I see people saying we should just chuck it in and take our losses, and then think of all the sacrifices I made in 9 years of military for this country, and remember my friends that didn't make it back or made it back missing parts, I wonder why the hell we even bothered." As I said before, you are not the only one on here who served in the military. You are not the only one who lost friends due to war. Your appeal to emotions is just that, an appeal to emotions and not to logic. And this last little bit about sacrifices, is just puff. We have to somehow in this world where death and destruction lie in wait all around us, make some choices and do the best we can for the largest number of people. We cannot nor will we ever be able to say, we can now go on since we will not lose anyone else. To believe we can is utter foolishness. We at some point need to make a decision and it will take real sacrifices, not vapid sit on your ass ones. We might disagree as to the timing of when this will be, but we do need to make a decision.

I think you and many others have already made that decision.
And again, you are the one that gets to pick. Enjoy it when you cash your pay check. I won't have any part of it.
I'm not the one saying people should go back to work, even in my little area where as far as I know, only one person has tested positive for Covid19.
I never said I was the only one that served either.
I never said or implied 'indefinitely' either..that, is something you chose to infer. (I personally, in my layman's opinion, suspect that 4- 6 weeks would be sufficient or until the infection curve is mostly flattened out.)


People are still trying to compare this to auto accidents, influenza and anything else in order to minimize the seriousness of risk.
Don't compare it TO those unrelated factors..add it TO them.

I saw a graphic a couple of days ago that showed approx 200 people/day died from influenza last winter in the US. For the last 3 days, we have exceeded that in daily deaths from Covid-19. The curve will flatten for us, just as it did in China, South Korea and everywhere else these protocols were implemented and adhered to.. reports out of Italy say a LOT of people there are ignoring the separation and lockdown protocols, so it will likely take them longer to see the results other nations have seen..


If we can't do this for a few weeks, then we were never much of a people or nation to begin with and certainly not to the level our parent's generation was. We've become soft, self absorbed and selfish.


People try to say "This is not about money..it's about the country!"

It's always about money.
That and our own little insignificant lives being able to go where we want and do the little bs things we have taken for granted for so long.

[This message has been edited by maryjane (edited 03-27-2020).]

[This message has been edited by rinselberg (edited 03-27-2020).]