Pessimism

My pessimism has grown over the past couple days over the virus. Most of my anger and frustration directed toward our "elites" and politicians for their total lack of competence. Or perhaps it should be directed at our culture for valuing partisanship/ideology over competence. As far as I can tell, our trajectory on this virus things is as follows --

1) All the "smart" folks telling us not to worry about it.

2) Then, suddenly, after it is way too late, our country panics into "social distancing," ie shutting down 50% of the economy to prevent overwhelming the healthcare system.

3) Meanwhile, it's not clear hospitalization and the use of ventilators even saves lives with this virus.

4) Meanwhile, we have a toilet paper shortage because apparently, a country who could once put a man on the moon, finds it difficult to re-package commercial toilet paper for home consumption. Is this a joke?

5) And apparently this same country can't make enough masks, ie cloth filters with rubber bands to keep our doctors and nurses safe to see patients, either.

Let me put it another way - what element of this whole situation has impressed me? Using my eyes, the only thing that's been somewhat impressive is the rapid way most folks adjusted into the social distancing guidelines when it became apparent we had to take this plan of action. And I'm somewhat impressed by ZOOM, except for the fact that it's hacking all our information.

So on some microlevels things are working...but it's the macro stuff that bugs me. For awhile, I was giving everything a pass -- this was an every 100 year event that was difficult to plan for -- but was it, really? The more I see, the folks who were supposed to keep their eyes out for this stuff were primarily concerned with covering their asses, following rules, and keeping their jobs.