by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
It is growing more and more apparent that something I’ve been ranting about for some time — The Gray Plague — is a very real possibility going forward. In fact, given how much of the levers of power are controlled by, well, old people, the way the general populace might wake up to the severity of the crisis we’re facing is the first wave of The Gray Plague.
I’m not advocating — it’s not like I’m rooting for this to happen, despite what Don Jr. might say — but we have to take this seriously. Should a number of older powerful people begin to drop dead, then, well, it’s not something we can just lulz. There will, in fact, be real-world consquences that change the lives of millions.
I will note, in passing that on a superficial level I’ve noticed a minor uptick in 80-year-old people dying. Jack Welch. James Lipton. A few others. It’s at least possible that a combination of family privacy and misdiagnosis is causing us to not to realize that The Gray Plague is ALREADY HERE. The death rate for people in their 80s is a brutal 15%.
Or, if you want to really think strictly from the metric of saving as many lives as possible, if the families of some of these 80s year old people would come out and say their loved one had died of COVID19, then, maybe, a lot more people would take this seriously and lives might be saved because of this. But that may be rather delusional this early in the process. It may take someone really powerful for that to happen, which, in itself, is rather tragic.
Anyway, maybe this is I’m just being hysterical as everyone keeps telling me. Trump tells me’s going to magically vanish in April and Little Big Man Mick Mulvaney said I should just “turn the TV off” if I’m worried. Right? Lulz.
