Slightly political. If that’s not your thing, turn back now. Fair warning.

Ahem. Yes, survival skills. Most of which I’ve been practicing for years without knowing it. Wash your hands? Absolutely. Social Distancing? That’s my default position. Never thought of it as a virtue, except in the sense that it’s almost the only way to get any writing done, but with COVID-19? Suddenly it’s a whole new hashtag.

Can we be honest here? Covid-19 is not even remotely at “The Stand” level bad, but it’s bad enough. Made worse by a WH that won’t tell the truth even when it really, really needs to do that. 45 (Mr. “I take no responsibility”) is clearly incapable of dealing with the situation nor wants to do so, except for how it might affect the stock market and re-election. So as a result, except for a few sane voices in the CDC and some state and local level entities on the ball, we’re pretty much on our own.

It really shouldn’t be this way, folks.

Take the disbanding of the US pandemic response team in 2018. The logic is that “we shouldn’t have people getting paid when we don’t need them” and that we could just rehire the people in an emergency.  The same logic would require disbanding the fire departments, since fires don’t happen all the time. Does anyone think that’s a good idea? It’s pure business logic, where having more people than  you need doesn’t make any financial sense. On the other hand, you get a fire? It’s too late to rehire and no time to retrain. The building’s burned down by then, and probably taken out most of downtown. Does anyone really believe we can reassemble and hire a trained pandemic team with experience and the right expertise on short notice? Does the WH even believe that? So why haven’t they already done it? We all know the answer.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Trying to run a government like a business is a really bad idea, because a government is not a business. It’s an entirely different skill set, with different goals and different expertise required.

Even a good businessman in that position is not a good idea. As to what we have now?

Again, we’re on our own.