I truly don't understand America. The disconnect between reality and the fantasy they seem to live in is vast. COVID-19 wasn't deadly. My husband tested positive, and the rest of my family, including me, probably have it, too. We are fine. It is somewhere between a bad cold and a mild flu. For me, it is more like a bad sinus infection, and I have heart problems, so based on all the hype I am still expecting to end up in the hospital. But we put people out of work. 33.5 million people have lost their jobs... for this. Did we stop the spread? No. Millions of people have had it in NY and LA without any or very mild symptoms. Or, they thought they had a sinus infection and pushed through it. People who stayed inside and isolated themselves as told were more likely to end up hospitalized in NY. Not the people who went about their business as best they could. It's over. The military is packing up and heading home without treating one patient in their makeshift hospitals. Trillions of dollars have been spent-- not on improving healthcare or access to health care for the poor, but on buying unused ventilators and paying unemployment benefits for people who had jobs. Still, people following the doom and gloom of the news ignore Georgia's real numbers that have drastically decreased since they fully opened, and cry about the second wave. These are the people who have been getting paychecks--the ones that find it easy to ignore the fact 15 million people still haven't received unemployment benefits after 2 months and some people are not getting anything or only fractions of what they were once getting. People are facing foreclosure and financial doom because the government forbid them to work. Worse yet, many of these people are still so terrified about COVID-19 that they will never come out of their homes and do not care that they are not buying food or meds they need because to them, dying of hunger and their current diseases is better than a small chance of dying from COVID-19. Our economy contracted by 4% in the first quarter, and people are brushing that aside as insignificant--despite the fact we were only closed 2 weeks in the first quarter and we are going to have been closed almost 2 months or more in the second quarter. They ignore that our ability to spend all those trillions on useless things is dependent on our GDP.
But, Sweet Tomatoes, the rich person's buffet, is closing. For that, they are all sad. Not one tear was shed when food bank lines extended down the street as far as could be seen. Not one "Wow, we will miss them" for the 7 million mom and pop businesses that may never reopen. No, a rich person's buffet is the only thing to get sad sentiments. We are sick, America, and it isn't with COVID-19. It is with apathy toward our fellow man.
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