I can’t help thinking about what might have been. What could have been. The fictional truth of Wag the Dog combined with the actual truth of the USA after Pearl Harbor, after 9/11. Maybe the USA in 2009?
We’ve come together in a crisis. We have that capability. We look for a leader to pull us together with a call to action around a common cause.
I keep thinking where we might be now if we’d had that kind of leadership beginning in March. The speech to the nation with call to action. “Fellow citizens, this is real, we have to pull together.” All leaders and all messaging go to unity, masks, PPE, a concerted national effort to mobilize around mitigation, masks, equipment, supplies, and sacrifice. “We will beat this thing.”
On this board we've seen long debates about whether we were too late, did we blow it in January and February, could we have come together with the right leadership, are we culturally inept, would the most respected newspapers have zigged if Trump had zagged, but I don't buy it. With the right leadership we would have had the right national response. I'm stating a belief, an opinion; it's all hypothetical so we don't get facts, or links. We have to live with what might have been.
Instead of leadership and unity, we got this:
![[Image: EbjCyeAUMAAvAzJ?format=png&name=900x900]](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EbjCyeAUMAAvAzJ?format=png&name=900x900)
Aren't the other countries in the chart above similar in culture to ours? What is the difference between them and us, in a broad-brush generalized way? Leadership. We didn't have crisis leadership. We had divide-us leadership. And because of that, while we could have had the curve of any one of these other places, we have the disaster we see now.
Ironic that we debated the so-called "jobs-vs-lives" dilemma a couple of months ago. Look at it now. Did emphasizing jobs over caution in the last two months protect our jobs and economic health? Aren't we now headed for a much longer, much worse economic downturn on top of the thousands of lives we're going to lose that we wouldn't have it we'd had normal crisis leadership?
Is it now disastrously too late for us? Are we doomed to this getting that much worse?
We’ve come together in a crisis. We have that capability. We look for a leader to pull us together with a call to action around a common cause.
I keep thinking where we might be now if we’d had that kind of leadership beginning in March. The speech to the nation with call to action. “Fellow citizens, this is real, we have to pull together.” All leaders and all messaging go to unity, masks, PPE, a concerted national effort to mobilize around mitigation, masks, equipment, supplies, and sacrifice. “We will beat this thing.”
On this board we've seen long debates about whether we were too late, did we blow it in January and February, could we have come together with the right leadership, are we culturally inept, would the most respected newspapers have zigged if Trump had zagged, but I don't buy it. With the right leadership we would have had the right national response. I'm stating a belief, an opinion; it's all hypothetical so we don't get facts, or links. We have to live with what might have been.
Instead of leadership and unity, we got this:
Aren't the other countries in the chart above similar in culture to ours? What is the difference between them and us, in a broad-brush generalized way? Leadership. We didn't have crisis leadership. We had divide-us leadership. And because of that, while we could have had the curve of any one of these other places, we have the disaster we see now.
Ironic that we debated the so-called "jobs-vs-lives" dilemma a couple of months ago. Look at it now. Did emphasizing jobs over caution in the last two months protect our jobs and economic health? Aren't we now headed for a much longer, much worse economic downturn on top of the thousands of lives we're going to lose that we wouldn't have it we'd had normal crisis leadership?
Is it now disastrously too late for us? Are we doomed to this getting that much worse?
