Roads Less Traveled

So, I’m having a hard time buying the idea that any lockdown needed to happen because of a virus that is unlikely to kill more than one person in every 100,000 on this planet.  I’m having such a hard time, in fact, that I’ve tried to come up with some kind of alternative explanation that suits the facts…an explanation that actually makes logical sense.  Allow me to posit this:
Putin met with MBS (Saudi leader) the first week in March.  At that point, the coronavirus was just underway in Asia but nowhere else, really.  They discussed oil production cuts.  Putin refused, the Saudis threw their production wide open, and now oil prices are in negative territory for the first time in history.

So this is what America has come to circa 2020: a nation huddled in their homes hoping to avoid illness and death from an obscure virus created in a lab in China.  Businesses shuttered.  Roads emptied.  People eyeing each other suspiciously as they pass in the supermarket aisles, snapping up all of the toilet paper that their SUV can carry while wearing their N95 masks and gloves.   Police arresting pastors for conducting church services.  Neighbors snitching on each other.  An entire country in lockdown over a “pandemic” that is unlikely to affect one person in a hundred, even if we accept the most dire predictions at face value.  I would not have believed it if you had told me 20 years ago that this could be possible in the land of the free and the home of the brave, but here we are.

I love California.  I love its jaw-dropping coastlines, its fern-covered forests filled with giant trees, its world-class wines and sun-drenched vineyards, and the granite grey mountains hewn from the earth like slabs of marbled clay.  It’s a vast state filled with natural and man-made wonders.  I spent 50 days exploring it, and I’d gladly spend 50 more.