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Virus Has Exposed Modern Americans' Disconnect from Reality
[American Greatness] By now, the Wuhan virus has hit home for everyone. Stores ransacked; schools closed; all large gatherings and events canceled; long-distance travel prohibited; pork-filled stimulus bills written and debated; some major cities enforcing mandatory quarantines. People everywhere now remain anxious in their homes and plan to stay there for at least another month, rationing precious toilet paper and keeping updated on the situation.While the experts claim that little is known about the Wuhan virus, enough is known to suggest that the response has been excessive. While there is a worrying possibility that the Wuhan virus will make a sizable impact on public health (along with the possibility that it probably won’t), the hype surrounding it has already created a huge imposition on daily life and cost the global economy trillions of dollars. Everyone must "do their part" to confront the pandemic or face the wrath of their conscientious peers. This kind of hype and the subsequent reaction to it seems to grow worse with each year. Right before the Wuhan virus, there was President Trump’s "historic" impeachment. And before that, there was the death of General Qasem Soleimani and the possibility of World War III. And before that, in no particular order, there was the imminent climate catastrophe, Russian collusion and the Mueller report, the Amazon rainforest burning down, and periodic nuclear threats from North Korea. People should know better by now, yet they seem to fall for the hype every time‐including many conservatives. The promise of the tech age and the ubiquity of smartphones and the internet was that it would arm people with relevant information and rational courses of action. Rather, it has done the opposite‐magnifying doubts and fears about everything and everyone. In most cases, the only thing that information technology has done is cause people to become less tethered to reality. Screens now replace people’s senses, and the algorithms embedded in social media do people’s thinking for them. As such, most people spend more time in the virtual world and less time in the real one, making them ever more vulnerable to exaggerated doomsday narratives. In particular, this retreat from reality takes a toll on a person’s memory, imagination, and common sense. Remember swine flu? Or bird flu? Or Ebola? Or Zika? Or SARS? Each of these diseases from the past two decades was arguably worse than the Wuhan virus. In the case of swine flu, more than 1,000 people died from it before Obama declared a state of emergency. Big Tech and the mainstream news will never report this. And yet, for all their distrust of the media, people still seem inclined to believe the pundits and clueless scientists over their own experience. This then leads to a lack of context. Everything seems new and unprecedented, and therefore unknown and scary‐except that this isn’t true. Pandemics have always existed, and there are proven ways to deal with them that don’t involve shutting down the economy and putting everyone under house arrest. Posted by: Besoeker 2020-03-30 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=567342 |