It is April 2020 and I’m going to guess that when you see this your life will have been permanently changed in some way by the coronavirus crisis. I’m not calling it a pandemic, because in a pandemic millions would die all over the world. So far in terms of deaths, we have had an average flu season with a few spikes in places where they have a lot of radio frequencies, air pollution, poor sanitation, elderly population, and incompetent public officials. The medical crisis may be bad where you live, but it is nothing compared to the economic destruction which we have all allowed to happen all over the world. The cost is already between 6 and 20 trillion dollars, I would say, and rising in economic damage from lockdowns, businesses closing, jobs lost, supply chains disrupted, food production and supply severely crippled, transportation pared down to a minimum, and medical industry chaos where they can’t even seem to get a reliable test for the presumed disease, month after month after month. It is a world-class fiasco where our nation’s medical officials gathered behind a podium to tell us all how to respond to the ongoing crisis, and none of our medical officials were wearing a mask. How is this for social distancing? You probably know the way our economy is measured is by GDP, gross domestic product, how much we produce, and how much money we exchange for the products and services we create. When we are told to go home, not work, close our businesses, this is like a bullet to the head of the GDP, and this was not just one country, this was global. When annual GDP goes down or goes up, less than 2 percent that indicates a recession; GDP must be a solid, positive number year to year to balance taxes, debt, crime, and natural disasters and the normal fluxes of commerce. It has been conservatively projected that the pandemic lockdown will take US GDP down by 20 to 40 percent annually. It will be a miracle if a recession is all we get. The many countries we rely on to help us recover will have their GDP down, worse than ours. Usually, when one country suffers a disaster, other countries come to its aid. This is the first time in recent history, when essentially all developed countries have suffered an economic disaster at the same time. Ladies and gentlemen, we are going to hurt. So, here is the lesson we have learned. Our economy in society was badly damaged, but not by the disease it was by the reckless, corrupt, hysterical, and ill-informed policies that were shoved down our throats by media, big pharma, and a scattering of power-crazed politicians, social isolation, masks, lockdowns, and slamming commerce to a halt globally in a span of barely a week in late March. This is, by any definition, the kind of black swan event, which certain financial advisors have been predicting for years, because our global economy was so fragile before the coronavirus dog and pony show. The financial analysts have been waiting for a leaf to fall and cause an economic avalanche. Well, the lockdown is an avalanche all by itself, but the destruction will not be limited to the speculative financial markets, but crippling almost everything that the financial markets depend on to stay solvent and functioning as well as crippling the markets where you and I get our toilet paper, bread, and rice. So, it is clear that coronavirus, which is roughly equivalent to an average flu season, is a minor contributor to the global economic catastrophe that will result from the lockdown of people, businesses, government, and trade which all have economic consequences far beyond the disease itself, but ironically what has caused massive damage to our global economy was us. It was our belief in the hype, in a hysteria, and our compliance with the ridiculous and unnecessary behavioral dictates, coming from people who seem to know nothing about either medicine or economics. Mayors, governors, and our presidential advisors, the president himself told us to do things we knew would cause damage to ourselves in our community. Many of us knew these impulsive precautions and shutdowns were not necessary, and, yet, the general public, without any noticeable hesitation, went into full compliance, went home, isolated ourselves, sabotaged our own livelihoods, stopped providing goods and services for others, dismantled our critical supply lines of food, goods, medicine, everything. It was not just that there was a disease or there was a lot of bad ideas and how to react to that disease, it was our obedience, our compliance, that did most of the damage. What you and I did will cause, on a global level, poverty, suicides, famine, and extended crises for nearly all of us because many businesses cannot afford to close for weeks or months. Many of them have permanently lost their suppliers, defaulted on their credit or their rents, lost their employees and their customers, farmers have thrown away millions of pounds of food because restaurants were closed, and grocery stores ran out of everything because that restaurant food could not be redirected to the grocery stores in time, too much food over here, not enough food over there, massive waste in efficiency, mismanagement on a worldwide scale, complete idiocy in policy. You and I supported these policies as if our media and our politicians knew what they were doing. We did this to ourselves. We listened to career public servants who have no business commanding people around. In fact, no authority to do so. Their job is to give us information and let us find our own solutions, but – oh no! we need central planners, at least, that’s what the central planners tell us. They had to become little dictators threatening to shut off our utilities if we did not close our businesses, threatening to arrest us if we did not self-quarantine for no apparent reason, telling us to report each other to them if someone did not obey the commands of our stooge officials who literally let us off a cliff in their ignorance and ego driven zeal. We failed ourselves by listening to fools talking to us like we were fools. We must not let that happen again. We have to use our common sense. We have to find our own local solutions and tune out from the ivory tower gang. We have to be responsible for ourselves, our families, our neighbors, and the last thing we need is to shut down civilization, shut down society, shut down the economic engine on which we all depend to eat, live, and survive. I don’t care what kind of pandemic we’re having, society, as we know it, as we need it, cannot sustain commercial lockdowns, there are too many of us to feed, too many of us who rely on the supply chains for too many things. The disruptions are catastrophic for some, deadly for others. There will be a death toll on the lockdown, especially poor countries from famine, suicides, violence. By letting this happen, we are bringing calamity upon ourselves. Commercial society is like a bicycle if you stop moving, you fall over and crash. You don’t just perch there and start rolling again sometimes later; you bruised your knee and hit your head. We have to understand that in global, commercial systems, as complex as we have today, it is absolute lunacy for some poorly informed politician to step up to a microphone and call for everyone to stop what they are doing and go home. Most of us can easily exercise better judgment than our politicians have shown us, especially when it comes to our own special, local circumstances, our own families and friends, things our politicians know nothing about. They have no idea what we need or what we can do to solve our immediate problems. As long as stores are kept open and people are not prevented from gathering, we can help each other, serve each other, and take action, rather than sitting around alone in our pajamas, in our homes, while the world disintegrates around us and we slowly run out of Top Ramen.
Society is a massively complex thing, and we all rely on each other. We rely on what we do for each other, every day, every job matters, every supply line matters, every store and office and business matters. There is no such thing as a non-essential job or business that is someone’s job or business, and they need it to survive. If you try and flip a switch and pause all of that for a month or two, you cause damage. The only way to stop a freight train quickly is for the train to hit another train. It causes damage. We have damaged society at the very foundation. We are shattering the massive civic engine that fills all of our complex needs as they arise in real time, day by day.
I think, by now, we have all realized that our civilization is more fragile than we thought. We cannot allow our politicians and bureaucrats and global chess players to mess with us in these ways. There are many people who went home from work, locked their doors, thought of how many people needed the things they would be making: the food, the products, and services they could have been providing. They knew that, they knew by not working, by closing their businesses, they would be hurting people. You may be one of those people who could have made this easier for others by staying on the job, but we were told there was a big, bad disease by a bunch of public officials who thought overreacting would be better for their careers. What about our careers? And many of the businesses that we depend on will never be able to reopen.
A quarantine is a drastic measure. A quarantine should only be used when there is an immediate, local life-and-death situation. Quarantining people who are not sick makes no sense whatsoever. Most of the people who went into quarantine did not have the slightest danger of catching or transmitting any disease. We will study for years to figure out how we fell for this. Entire towns were quarantined when there wasn’t even one sick person in the town. There could not be a better demonstration of heard insanity, but even if people are sick there was a much bigger disease that was causing much more harm, the disease of following nonsensical orders, the disease of believing lies and hysteria, the disease of giving up our ability to help ourselves, the disease of relying on people who had no ability to help us telling us what to do, the disease of not thinking for ourselves.
It’s alright we made a mistake, but have we learned anything from this? Are we going to go out now and try to rebuild what we had, try to repair the damage and tell everyone who tries to stop us that they will not be allowed to do that? In a crisis, it is not our politicians we should be serving, it is the people around us, and we should do that any way we can find that works. Maybe we’ll get the flu, we’ve had the flu before, and we’ll have it again. Life goes on, or, at least, we can try to make life go on. You can’t suspend life until there is no more risk. That is not how it works. If you want to quarantine yourself, go ahead, go ahead and do that, but do not interfere with people who are more courageous and positive than you. Do not preach to people about wearing masks and social distancing, just go home, lie down, while the rest of us try and pull things back together in whatever way we can, hopefully without any interference. Your governor can’t rebuild your business or salvage your job, as usual that will be on us. We may be able to salvage our economy, supply lines, our standard of living, or we may not, but either way we are doomed if we don’t get back to work, or if we ever let anything like this happen again.
Jerry Day originally published, “Pandemic Alert Fiasco” on YouTube in April 2020. Support Jerry’s work by donating bitcoin: 1CQEFo1rQ412FhWV8jZntuiqpmgHeFVxYv
Transcribed by Oluwafunmilayo Elizabeth Bamidele – contact her via email for her transcription services: akinsojioluwafunmilayo@gmail.com.
