by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
As I have mentioned, I was at a restaurant near my home when I noticed a Virginia State Trooper. On a lark, I engaged him and mentioned he was about to face a serious crisis. First, he was a dismissive dick. Second, he pretty much lulz the idea that any such thing was possible.
Now, I get it — you don’t exactly want Stewart Smally to be a State Trooper. But something about how he acted as if what I mentioned as insane really grated on my nerves. “We all have opinions,” he said.
The issue is — what’s bouncing around the world right now is not my “opinion.” It’s a cold hard fact. And the fact that next door North Carolina is echoing that State Trooper by lulzing its first reported case of COVID19 is rather disturbing to this Virginian. Apparently, the state government has bought into Trump’s Big Lie that the “coverage” of COVID19 is just a “liberal media hoax designed to bring him down.”
I got nothing against North Carolina, but come on guys, get it together. I live close enough to the NC border that it would not be difficult to imagine whatever growing COVID19 blackhole they have is probably going to consume my community, too.
This does, however, raise the question — how would we know that things have come to a head in North Carolina?
Well, I would suppose that at some point in the next, say, two weeks –about the Ides of March — the number of sick and dying would have grown to such a huge part of the population that both the economy and civil order would collapse. The Gray Plague would kick in and many, many lives that might otherwise be saved will be lost.
It will be chaos. This will not happen in a vacuum, however. By that point, the entire United States will be on its knees. We will be the most vulnerable we’ve been since the end of the Civil War. It would make a lot of sense if at that point a lot of bad actors around the world, seeing their chance, started to attack each other — and us.
But it’s just the flu, right?