Thursday, May 28, 2020

After the Covid Apocalypse

The threat in March of a Covid-19 apocalypse worked: From coast to coast, the $21 trillion U.S. economy essentially shut down.

Despite the grim Covid reality in New York City, a coalition of some 300 small businesses, called Re-Open New York, opened their doors Tuesday.

Simcha Minkowitz, who owns a jewelry store in Brooklyn, told Crain's: "It doesn't make sense. He is allowing people in parks to be all together, but store owners are the worst people and can't open." She's got that right.

The case for a nationwide economic lockdown worked because people everywhere in the U.S. worried, based on what they read or saw, that they could become another New York, New Jersey or Seattle.

The reality now in front of us is that people across the U.S. have experienced the coronavirus in very different ways.

It distorts the diversity of the American political experience, just as the nationalized narrative of a Covid apocalypse has distorted that experience.

The one Covid datum that moves people is the chance of dying from it.

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