Posted on 04/17/2020 7:45:40 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
It is the American people, not the government who will decide when this lockdown is over. And they are getting closer to that decision.
New York City has been on lockdown for about a month. Up until this past week the effect has been stark and nearly universal. Most mornings, weather permitting, I sit in my small Brooklyn backyard as the day begins. For weeks the loudest sound has been the silence, quiet streets forming a backdrop for distant sirens and harbor boat horns. That is changing, the white noise of car traffic, like an ocean lapping on a beach has returned.
On my “essential walks” which I take daily to the grocery or the bodega, I traverse an overpass above the Brooklyn Queens Expressway. For the past month traffic has been spare, an emergency vehicle here and there, not much more. That too has changed. While it has not returned to the soul crushing bumper-to-bumper standstill that makes the BQE infamous, the number of cars coursing to and from Staten Island has built up everyday.
What is important and telling about the differences in people’s behavior this week is that no city or state government policies have actually changed. The people of New York themselves, and from accounts across the country in other places as well, have simply decided to loosen the guidelines for themselves. We tend to think of the idea of the government existing through the consent of the governed as being about elections, but it is about more than that, the successful lockdown of New York City was not enforced as much as it was consented to.
This phenomenon is something that New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo seems to understand. Cuomo was asked during one of his daily press conferences this week if he is worried that his steady stream of good news about the number of deaths stabilizing instead of increasing and the decrease in coronavirus cases and hospitalizations could give New Yorkers a false sense of security. His answer was basically that he has to tell citizens the truth or he loses his credibility.
Furthermore, Cuomo has admitted on several occasions that with 19 million people living in the New York City metro area, he really is not capable of enforcing many lockdown and social distancing measures. As he puts it, “we can’t arrest 19 million people.” Where that leaves us is in a democratic dance, a push and pull between elected officials and the people who elected them, both sides respectful of the other, but both also possessed of the power shape the virus response.
The state and local government in New York City can see what is happening They know the streets are filling back up. This week it was announced that starting Friday all riders on New York subways and busses must wear masks. This on some level is a concession that New Yorkers are once again descending below Gotham to the turnstiles and edging closer back to their normal lives.
The purpose of the lockdown was made very clear a month ago. It was to flatten the curve of cases in order to ensure that our hospitals were not overrun. That has been achieved, makeshift hospitals and the USS Comfort have thankfully turned out to be precautions we didn’t need. In a story that will disappear from the news media faster than a cockroach under kitchen lights, the Trump administration was proven correct about having the ventilators the nation needed. We achieved the goal at catastrophic economic expense to millions of Americans, and now Americans know it is time to start the return to our new normal.
The country has reason to be proud of its response to the Wuhan virus. If not for the fact that much of our corporate media sees its entire job as trashing Donald Trump and his administration, there would be a more celebratory feeling about this shared success. But even though a well-deserved moment of national pride is probably impossible, the American people know the tide is turning and they are anxious to get back to their lives.
Over the next week or two this balance between the power of the government and the will of the people will continue to shape the coronavirus response. But that balance is beginning to shift in favor of the population, this is America, and it is Americans, not our government that will ultimately decide when this cloud lifts. That is as it should be, and thankfully leaders like Trump and Cuomo understand this. The United States began in earnest with the words “We the people.” The coronavirus lockdown will end as a result of that very same authority.
Mass produce remdesivir and the crisis will go away.
I think that people have done their part as best as they could do. Now it’s time to get back to normal life as best as we can and hopefully we can learn from this exercise that shutting down an entire economy was not the best solution.
President Trump puts the World back to work.
Yup. That’s how this ends.
People get fed-up with social distancing and a mass jailbreak occurs. We reach herd immunity and the vaccine companies don’t get their big payday. Dr. Fauci retires and tries to stay out of airports and restaurants where he’s sure to receive a verbal ass-reaming.
At some point, the number of people refusing to obey will be so massive that they will not be able to enforce the diktats without using deadly force. I posit that the governors won’t do that and if they tried, the enforcement arm wouldn’t comply.
I think that’s true here in the Phoenix area as well. I’ve been working everyday since this thing started and on my drive into work, I’ve noticed that the freeway traffic, little by little, has been increasing.
Traffic is getting heavier in Atlanta.
Plan not fast enough.
I don’t put my mask on until I am 6 feet from the front of a store that requires it. Our county says you have to wear one if you step out of your front door. These masks are picking up these germs and concentrating them over your mouth and nose. If there is a Corona virus in the air it’s going to end up on your mask. When you take off the mask the virus is going to spread all over your hands and your car and your house.
Two weeks ago the experts were telling us that masks are not helpful and could be harmful. Now the Nazis are telling us we have to wear them.
Nobody knows what they are doing. The country has gone nuts.
It’s time to take our country back and get back to living a normal life. Not a risk free life. A normal life.
What difference does it make if you lose your life and in the process everyone loses their livelihoods? Who wants to live in a world where you have to wear face masks and not touch anyone, can’t go fishing or to movies (ok I can do without that one)
All the homes in our city received a “rat” card that we could call into city hall and rat a neighbor or someone having their family over. I phone them and rat myself, but nobody shows up.
There was a little blurb article in our weekly paper that said MCSO (Maricopa County Sheriffs Office) has been busy with ‘compliance’ complaints. One resident complaining about another resident not keeping ‘social distance’ or something. I hadn’t been to the grocery store for a while, but went on Tuesday. Our main store, a Safeway, has instituted a ‘one person out/ one person in’ policy. They also have decal arrows on the floor to show which way the ‘traffic’ should flow through each aisle.
WHERE HAS MY COUNTRY GONE??
STOP IT! RIGHT NOW!
And people (LEFTISTS) must be using those cards constantly.......
I think that's a false dichotomy.
In places that are affected like NYC it isn't a conflict.
People haven't been social distancing just because the government wants them to. They're doing it because they know it works.
Now that I’ve had a chance to sleep on it I can see certain nuances in Trump’s plan.
He let Fauci and Birx basically write it and present it. Birx’ presentation was a confusing fustercluck that lost 80% of the public. But now when asked by presstitutes they’ll have to answer honestly that yes, Trump did what we advised him to do.
But, at the same time he put responsibility for enforcing the details of this plan totally on the Governors. They asked for it with their 10th. Amendment stompy-foot fit, and now they own it.
When directly asked if he would tell people not to protest Trump refused to do so. And there is every indication that they will, and that these protests will grow large and forceful.
This will force some of the recalcitrant Govs and Mayors to cave, and others to look on jealously at revived tax revenues as their own people seethe. They will turn on each other like starving rats.
The lockdown becomes self-ending when people simply refuse to obey it anymore. And the self-destruct sequence is triggered for the Dem Party.
All while Donald Trump has redistributed the political liability.
That’s risky, but upon further examination brilliant.
bump
‘the American people know the tide is turning and they are anxious to get back to their lives.’
this is causing some on this website to be very unhappy...
I drove into town for a funeral on Wedensday, and it looked like a pre-COVID 19 day to me...9 out of 10 businesses open, traffic, full gas stations, etc. The only business I did not see open was a large gym...restaurants were open (take out only, but open).
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