The idea that the worldwide lockdown of virtually every
country other than Sweden may have been an enormous mistake strikes many --
including world leaders; most scientists, especially health officials, doctors
and epidemiologists; those who work in major news media; opinion writers in
those media; and the hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people who put
their faith in these people -- as so preposterous as to be immoral. Timothy
Egan of The New York Times described Republicans who wish to enable their
states to open up as "the party of death."
That's the way it is today on planet Earth, where deceit,
cowardice and immaturity now dominate almost all societies because the elites
are deceitful, cowardly and immature.
But for those open to reading thoughts they may differ
with, here is the case for why the worldwide lockdown is not only a mistake but
also, possibly, the worst mistake the world has ever made. And for those
intellectually challenged by the English language and/or logic,
"mistake" and "evil" are not synonyms. The lockdown is a
mistake; the Holocaust, slavery, communism, fascism, etc., were evils. Massive
mistakes are made by arrogant fools; massive evils are committed by evil
people.
The forcible prevention of Americans from doing anything
except what politicians deem "essential" has led to the worst economy
in American history since the Great Depression of the 1930s. It is
panic and hysteria, not the coronavirus, that created this
catastrophe. And the consequences in much of the world will be more horrible
than in America.
The United Nations World Food Programme, or the WFP,
states that by the end of the year, more than 260 million people will face
starvation -- double last year's figures. According to WFP director David
Beasley on April 21: "We could be looking at famine in about three dozen
countries. ... There is also a real danger that more people could
potentially die from the economic impact of COVID-19 than from the virus itself"
(italics added).
That would be enough to characterize the worldwide
lockdown as a deathly error. But there is much more. If global GDP declines by
5%, another 147 million people could be plunged into extreme poverty, according
to the International Food Policy Research Institute.
Foreign Policy magazine reports that, according to the
International Monetary Fund, the global economy will shrink by 3% in 2020,
marking the biggest downturn since the Great Depression, and the U.S., the
eurozone and Japan will contract by 5.9%, 7.5% and 5.2%, respectively.
Meanwhile, across South Asia, as of a month ago, tens of millions were already "struggling
to put food on the table." Again, all because of the lockdowns, not the
virus.
In one particularly incomprehensible act, the government
of India, a poor country of 1.3 billion people, locked down its people. As
Quartz India reported on April 22, "Coronavirus has killed only around 700
Indians ... a small number still compared to the 450,000 TB and 10,000-odd
malaria deaths recorded every year."
One of the thousands of unpaid garment workers protesting
the lockdown in Bangladesh understands the situation better than almost any
health official in the world: "We are starving. If we don't have food in
our stomach, what's the use of observing this lockdown?" But concern for
that Bangladeshi worker among the world's elites seems nonexistent.
The lockdown is "possibly even more catastrophic
(than the virus) in its outcome: the collapse of global food-supply systems
and widespread human starvation" (italics added). That was published in
the left-wing The Nation, which, nevertheless, enthusiastically supports lockdowns.
But the American left cares as much about the millions of non-Americans reduced
to hunger and starvation because of the lockdown as it does about the people of
upstate New York who have no incomes, despite the minuscule number of
coronavirus deaths there. Or about the citizens of Oregon, whose governor has
just announced the state will remain locked down until July 6. As of this
writing, a total of 109 people have died of the coronavirus in Oregon.
An example of how disinterested the left is in worldwide
suffering is made abundantly clear in a front-page "prayer" by a
left-wing Christian in the current issue of The Nation: "May we who are
merely inconvenienced remember those whose lives are at stake."
"Merely inconvenienced" is how the Rev. Dr. William
J. Barber II, a Protestant minister and president of the North Carolina NAACP,
describes the tens of millions of Americans rendered destitute, not to mention
the hundreds of millions around the world rendered not only penniless but
hungry. The truth is, like most of the elites, it is Barber who is "merely
inconvenienced." Indeed, the American battle today is between the merely
inconvenienced and the rest of America.
Michael Levitt, professor of structural biology at
Stanford Medical School and winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize in chemistry,
recently stated, "There is no doubt in my mind that when we come to look
back on this, the damage done by lockdown will exceed any saving of lives by a
huge factor."
To the left, anyone who questions the lockdown is driven
by preference for money over lives. Typical of the left's moral shallowness is
this headline on Salon this week:
"It's Time To Reject the Gods of Commerce: America
Is a Society, Not an 'Economy,'" with the subhead reading, "America
Is About People, Not Profit Margins."
And, of course, to smug editors and writers of The
Atlantic, in article after repetitive article, the fault lies not with the
lockdown but with President Donald Trump. The most popular article in The
Atlantic this week is titled "The Rest of the World Is Laughing at
Trump." The elites can afford to laugh at whatever they want. Meanwhile,
the less fortunate -- that is, most people -- are crying.
