This is why I voted “5” (but referenced the need for government). My hair isn’t on fire over this, and I have a long-angle lens on history that incorporates this kind of thing as a natural (and, in some sense, unavoidable) event, but there hasn’t been any way for me to project this kind of “middle-ground caution” within my professional or personal communities. It feels like everything went from “need for containment?? haha”, to “holy **** let’s shut everything down” in about 48 hours. And of course this is basically what happened across the nation.
We obviously had, and continue to have, a big Culture Problem in terms of responding to this kind of crisis. And there are ample reasons to think this problem would have reared its head in a number of different kinds of crises. That’s currently the deepest pit of worry that I have, since the politics of responding to disaster figure to be more and more prevalent as the climate crisis thickens. And, we’re really just at square one when it comes to dealing with one another through this, and having a clear vision of what our government should be doing.
rant over.