Public Comment

the recent coronavirus issue has caused a lot of trouble for our country, most of that trouble is not being caused by the virus and the people it kills itself but rather the actions politicians are taking in response to it. These days when photographs of young people out and about having fun pop up on social media people get angry. They fume about how young people are refusing to follow social distancing guidelines and putting public health at risk. Mayor London breed is now talking about shutting down the city’s parks because she claims that people are violating the shelter in place order. All of the politicians that support the shelter in place orders are operating off of a very dangerous fallacy that is ultimately going to cause more problems for our country than even 1 million deaths from coronavirus. We are essence teaching our seniors to live in fear of being killed by their grandchildren when those grandchildren decide to have some. Even worse, we are teaching the grandchildren to harbor hatred and contempt for their elders. 

Nobody is willing to discuss the fact that lockdowns and shutdowns implode your country’s economy. People who talk about this are labeled heretics and haters of science or even labeled Trump supporters. This is ridiculous because economics matters. Money talks and bullshit walks, that’s the saying that governs our lives here in America. A person who has no job and no income is going to have poorer health outcomes than one who does. We know from mass epidemiological studies that poverty kills by trashing people’s health. If these measures that were taking push our country into a second Great Depression, the health outcomes of that will be absolutely catastrophic. The health outcomes and lost lives from an economic depression over the long run will kill way more than the coronavirus ever could. During the Great Depression people actually starved to death and people died because they couldn’t afford medical care just like people already die today because they can’t afford medical care. Never mind the fact that you also need an economy and tax revenue coming from that economy to pay for coronavirus. We impose lockdowns to save a couple thousand or even hundreds of thousands of lives at our own peril. Sure, we could save 10 maybe even 100,000 lives. And those lives would be saved in a relatively quick secession, assuming social distancing works, which it probably doesn’t anyway. But our politicians are not thinking about 1 to 5 years from now. They’re not thinking about the hundreds of thousands of Americans who will die because of poverty. They’re not thinking about the millions of futures that will be turned to ash because of a second Great Depression. They don’t seem to care about this and that’s not right. 

So, what do we get instead of a reasonable acknowledgment of the serious human catastrophe that will unfold as a result of the shutdown of the country’s economy? We get something called quarantine shaming. When I announced on social media that I was still going to continue to do my job as a bike messenger so that I can pay my bills, somebody said that if his grandmother died of coronavirus it would be my fault. When I pressed him even further, he said that my staying home is the only thing that will slow the virus so that there will be a hospital bed for his grandmother if she gets the virus. That complying with the stay home order and being holed up in my room will save his grandma’s life because it will preserve hospital resources for her. I got news for you, that is the biggest piece of bullshit I have ever heard in my life. Now I’m not saying that this person on social media is an idiot, I don’t believe him to be one. He’s getting these ideas from people like London breed and Gavin Newsom. These charlatans are telling everybody that your decision to stay home will save lives. That is not true, your decision to stay home is not going to save a respirator or an ICU bed for somebody’s grandma. Your decision to go outside in violation of the shelter in place order is not going to kill somebody’s grandma or cause a public health crisis. I cannot even believe that these college-educated politicians along with the so-called doctors that are advising them would even advance such stupidity in the first place. That statement ‘stay home to flatten the curve so that we can preserve hospital resources’ is the absolute dumbest thing I’ve ever heard in my life. Unfortunately, were actually acting on this dumb thing so now in the intermediate future were also going to experience the horrible consequences of acting on the stupidity. 

So, when I choose to get out and do my job as a bike messenger, which by the way is exempt from the shelter in place order anyway, my decision to go to work is not going to impact the health of some senior citizen somewhere in the bay area. My decision to go outside is not going to clog up the hospitals or kill somebody’s loved one. The fact is that we don’t even have enough hospital beds for a flattened curve anyway. The fact is, flattening the curve doesn’t appear to work anyhow as we can see from both china and Italy. They imposed lockdowns and their curve still spiked before sharply falling off. We live in a dictatorship of the stupid, this dictatorship is going to kill a lot of people in the next 5 to 10 years. That is the pandemic that is going to kill lots of Americans, not corona virus. 

Gov. Newsom and his compatriots in the bay area have made the conscious decision to basically sacrifice the state’s economy to accomplish something that likely cannot be accomplished. They think that they are projecting strong and decisive leadership in defiance of that horrible trump administration. Right now, the average person believes this to be the case, but that is not going to last forever. When this is all over and the job losses mount and people begin suffering deaths of despair Gov. Newsom may very well find himself unable to win reelection. In fact, he could become the victim of a recall campaign which is already underway via Facebook groups like make California read again. So, there you have it, buzzwords like social distancing and shelter in place are bullshit. Somebody’s decision to go party with friends is not going to cause a public health crisis. Somebody’s decision to hole up in their room and not go to work is not going to abate a public health crisis. Now I want to talk about two men and two statements. 

As a young person, I have a lot of more senior citizen friends than most young people do. This is largely because of the types of homeless activism that I engaged in and circumstances that unfolded after my arrival in Berkeley in 2011. As such I tend to be very sensitive to the issues that senior citizens face. The way we treat our seniors as a country is absolutely disgusting, the way that we allow seniors to live on the street and kick them around when they have no place to go even more disgusting. The lieutenant governor of Texas recently made statements about senior citizens and coronavirus. He talked about how senior citizens may be willing to sacrifice their lives in order to preserve the economy for their grandchildren. Even insinuated that they should do so. Now I find his comments and the way he made them to be very disgusting and very insensitive. I sure as hell would not vote for such a man in this state or any other state and hope that he loses his reelection bid if and when he has one. However, we must consider the fact that behind every asshole statement there is a kernel of truth. The lieutenant governor’s statement does raise a very serious question that needs to be discussed before we do any more damage to the countrys economy. 

The question that the lieutenant governor’s statement raises is a very simple one. Is it worth it to save a couple hundred thousand senior citizens from dying of coronavirus, if it will cause a great depression that will become a living hell for tens of millions of Americans? This is a legitimate question folks, had the lieutenant governor just come right out and asked that question instead of being an asshole about it maybe he could be in front of the media engaging in an adult discussion about the topic. I used to be homeless before, I also grew up poor never knowing where my next meal was going to come from. During the Great Depression this happened on the scale of tens of millions of Americans. As I pointed out before, people died of starvation during the Great Depression and people will die of starvation during the next one to. Unlike coronavirus which primarily kills old people, starvation and other poverty related complications are equal opportunity killers. These things kill the elderly and they also kill the young and healthy to. Poverty related health outcomes do not discriminate based on age and health status. Many hundreds of thousands of Americans will end up homeless as a result of the second Great Depression. I will tell you right now that being homeless is worse than being dead. I repeat, being homeless is worse than death. Slowly starving to death because there’s no money for food is worse than dying of coronavirus. You can look at the literature about what a human being goes through when they starve to death and compare that to what a human being goes through when they die of coronavirus. The two don’t even compare. 

That is what the lieutenant governor of Texas is getting at, the medicine that we are administering may very well save a couple hundred thousand elderly people from dying at a horrible, catastrophic cost for everybody else. And so, the question is, given the cost of saving those lives, is it worth it? I hate to say it but it may not be worth it to save those lives. If I were the United States president and I had to deal with the coronavirus, I can tell you that I would be making very different decisions than the ones London breed and Gov. Newsom are making. If I had a choice between 300,000 people die of coronavirus or save 300,000 people from coronavirus but plunge the country into a second Great Depression, this would not be a choice I would take lightly. The first thing I would do is try the South Korea approach to see if that works. But if that didn’t work and it came down to extreme social distancing and a depression, or keep America open for business and 300,000 people die (assuming social distancing even works in the first place) I would have to choose the less bad of these two bad choices. The less bad of the two bad choices is to keep America open for business and accept the fact that 300,000 people are going to die. As president, I would have to make the choice to sacrifice 300,000 Americans in order to protect the lives, health and futures of the other 320 million Americans. That’s the brutal reality folks. Now look, we could’ve avoided all of this had our idiot president gotten ahead of this in January. Had our idiot president decided to do what the South Koreans were doing in January; nobody would even have to think about such a decision. But he didn’t and now it’s too late. There are no good choices, only less bad choices. 

The second person and the second statement that I want to get to is Donald Trump himself. I am not a Trump supporter nor have I ever been a Trump supporter. Regardless of what he does with lockdowns and the economy I will never vote for this asshole. He is a racist charlatan who is to blame for the predicament that our country is in right now. My candidate is Bernie Saunders, I hope he wins the Democrat primary because if he doesn’t then I will just boycott the presidential election entirely. Donald trump in recent days has been motivated by several conservative academics to try to end social distancing. These academics are looking at the cost of social distancing in relation to the lives that could potentially be saved by such measures. As a result of this Trump is now talking about trying to end the practice. If Donald Trump decides to end this practice, it will very likely save the economy if he does it quick enough. It will also likely reassure Trump supporters that the Donald is there man, he would likely win reelection by a huge margin if he keeps this latest promise he’s making. I hate to say it, but if Trump does this, I will support his decision to do it knowing what I know about economics and its relation to death and public health. That does not mean that I will vote for another four years of the Donald. Of course, Donald Trump will have obstacles in doing this, so I’m going to lay out how I hope he does it so that he can actually keep his promise. Gov. Newsom is talking about extending shelter in place to potentially July or even August. As Californians, we can’t wait that long. We can’t even wait another four weeks for this bullshit to come to an end. We need the shutdown to stop and we needed to stop very soon. 

The first thing that Donald Trump would need to do is say that he is withdrawing the social distancing guidelines. The second thing that Donald Trump would need to do is to request the governors of the 50 states to stop implementing shelter in place orders. It is highly unlikely that people like Gov. Newsom will accede to the president’s request to end the shutdown. So, the president will have to move to step three which would be highly controversial in the short term but if it saves the economy only seek to energize his base even more. He would then have to threaten these governors with enforcement action. I could imagine him getting on twitter saying that Newsom has asked number of hours to comply or federal agents are going to come and arrest him. Assuming that somebody like Gov. Newsom doesn’t comply, then we reach step four. President Trump would have to send federal law enforcement officers to the Statehouse and physically arrest Gov. Newsom. Gov. Newsom would then have to be put in a federal penitentiary somewhere or potentially sent to Guantánamo Bay for the duration of the coronavirus issue. Donald Trump would also likely have to detain and arrest a whole coterie of people in Newsom’s administration because of the state’s continuity of government plans. That means the lieutenant governor and anybody else who would step in to replace Mr. Newsom would also have to be detained or arrested assuming these people are going to stay the course with Newsom’s policies. 

I don’t know what Trump would have to do after arresting all of these people, but I imagine that he could find the answer in the fact that federal law and federal edicts always trumps state law and state edicts. It’s a well-settled area of constitutional law. I reiterate, I hate Trump I detest him a lot. He is a rank embarrassment and an idiot who could’ve avoided all of this simply by acting in January with testing and quarantining of sick people. Instead he chose to sit around and do absolutely nothing about it. Now we are in a position where there are only less bad options. Unfortunately, reopening the country now instead of waiting until June or July or whenever the hell Gov. Newsom decides to do it, is the less bad option even though it could depend on the efficacy of social distancing lead to a lot of deaths. So yes, I unfortunately support the president’s desire to reopen the country soon. Social distancing is so expensive in intermediate and long-term that you can’t afford it.