Not very long ago, President Trump tweeted, "We cannot let the
cure be worse than the problem itself." He was pilloried for
daring to suggest that government action with respect to the coronavirus
pandemic has both benefits and costs. Now he appears to be
"all-in" on the national lockdown and more in sync with
"expert" opinion and the big blue-state governors.
Given that we don't possess the luxury of hindsight, we
don't know if this is the correct move or not. But what's
indisputable is that this approach to a pandemic is unprecedented in America.
Recently, Manhattan's City Journal published the reflections of Clark Whelton,
a former speechwriter for New York City mayors Ed Koch and Rudy Giuliani, who
remembered living through the pandemic of 1957, known at the time by the
politically incorrect label "the Asian Flu." The virus was responsible for the deaths of
over a million people worldwide and 116,000 in the United States (which at the
time had about half the current population). And, yet, as Whelton
recalls:
One can speculate as to why two different eras produced such differences in reaction. There was no internet then, no 24-hour cable news networks, and no social media. And you had an adult population for whom the Great Depression was a clear and vivid memory........To Read More....[T]o the best of my knowledge, governors did not call out the National Guard, and political panic-mongers did not blame it all on President Eisenhower. College sports events were not cancelled, planes and trains continued to run, and Americans did not regard one another with fear and suspicion, touching elbows instead of hands. We took the Asian flu in stride. We said our prayers and took our chances.
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