| Economic Euthanasia or Die for the Dow |  |
By John Freivalds
JFA Press
Let's just cut to the chase, President Trump believes that we should stop worrying about the COVID-19 virus and its exponential growth and death rates and get the economy going. New York's Governor Cuomo announces that New York now has 25,000 cases of the virus and this is doubling every 3 days!
This is really a form of economic euthanasia for us seniors. Dictatorial leaders throughout history have always sought to get rid of "unproductive" seniors in one way or another and it was the fate that befell my grandmother during World War II at the hands of the Nazi's. Trump's mantra is: Let's stop sensationalizing the death rate of the corona virus and think more of getting the economy and the Dow Jones average up. But low and behold, elsewhere the President of India has just told his country of 1.3 billion people to stay indoors for three weeks!
Forget the old adage of "the doctor knows best." As you may have noticed, doctors are no longer welcome on the podium when Trump gives the daily virus update. The death rate of the virus, best case scenario, will stay the same until a vaccine is found. It will take at least a year for a vaccine to be deployable, not a couple of months. Alas, this virus is most deadly to seniors who can't afford to have this virus on top of the other problems that come with old age. I should know, I am 76 and past my economic prime.
Because I am selfish and more concerned about my staying alive rather than being patriotic about the economy and, thus, in Trump's terms I am -- an enemy of the people. No, President Trump did not invent that phrase as he claims. It become popular in a play of that name written by Henrik Ibsen in 1882 -- history does repeat itself. Who is Henrik Ibsen? He is a Swedish playwright who first popularized the term "Enemy of the People" in his play of the same name.
In An Enemy, Wikipedia puts it this way, "a doctor (but of course, ed. note) who discovers that the local spa which is a major tourist attraction is contaminated by a local tannery. He expects to be acclaimed for saving the town from the nightmare of infecting visitors with disease, but instead he is declared "an enemy of the people" by the locals who band against him . . . one prominent message of the play is that the individual (could this be Dr. Fauci?) who stands alone is more often right than the mass of the people, who are portrayed as ignorant and sleeplike."
The United States has really arrived at an existential moment in its history. To wit, Charles Darwin who wrote his epic Origin of Species in 1859 offers up some advice on how to face the future "It is not the strongest of the species who survives nor the most intelligent, rather that which is most adaptable to change."