It’s really this simple: the clever assholes who’ve spent their time snarking their way through denial or minimization of the COVID-19 pandemic have nothing to offer in the way of solutions to the actual problems anyone is facing right now. At this point, there’s only one solution at the disposal of the average person: ignore such people and render direct assistance to those in need.

This video overlaps with two I’ve previously spotlighted here, but no harm in that. The people in it are calmer than I could conceivably manage to be under their circumstances.  Compare what’s being said in it with what you see in this tweet. 

Priorities: false arrest is dystopian; medical catastrophe is par for the course. I know more about false arrest than most people, having been on the receiving end. As I’ve said elsewhere, I don’t think people who engage in social distancing should be punished for any legal infraction. That said, there is no comparison between false arrest on the one hand, and intubation without sedation, or death through respiratory arrest on the other. Feel free to take a look, making use of whatever bits of moral imagination or empathy you have at your disposal. 

A person who focuses on false arrest while evading the excruciating agony of unsedated intubation or respiratory failure is too devoid of common sense to be taken seriously on any matter of relevance to COVID-19. And a person who fixates on false arrest without offering his thoughts on this hellscape, or this, or this, or this, is flouting reality before his readers’ eyes and hoping they’ll flout it with him.

If The New York Times video doesn’t induce you to grasp the magnitude and intensity of the problem we face, along with the murderous insensitivity of our leaders (and “influencers”), and the need to render assistance to the greatest degree available to you, nothing can. Just find any hospital in the New York/New Jersey area, and give them whatever you can–money, materiel, labor. Anything is preferable to nothing, as amelioration is preferable to suffering, and life to death. 

Mass death is pretty much inevitable now. The only thing that redeems our national disgrace is health care workers’ willingness and ability to fight to the end, with the active support of those of us on the sidelines. You don’t want to face the mirror tomorrow, or a year from now, in the knowledge that you did less than you could have. Act now, and act fast. You won’t get a second chance.

PS. I’m told that Phil Magness is attacking me on Facebook or somewhere. Keep at it, Phil. The greater your industry, the bigger the hole you dig for yourself. The more you say, the stupider you look. It’s to my benefit that you keep talking, whatever you say.  Don’t stop on my account. I feel no need to attack you in secret, behind your back. If you think you can debate me, do it in the open. You know where to find me.