There's not very much sense of community in the United States anymore. We live in a "me" society. The cause of public health in the context of communicable disease demands some level of collective cooperation (and dare I say sacrifice) among people which appears to be just too much to ask.
Add to it a predisposition that if anything does not go one's way, well hell, it must be someone else's fault. And then there's our passion for conspiracy theories.
Yes, the politicians on both sides seized the opportunity to capitalize on a crisis that ought not be wasted. They weaponized it for their own self interest, the bastards.
It did not help that when the pandemic broke we had blunt instrument leadership that wasn't well suited to a complex, science based crisis. In other words, whatever Trump may be, a global public health pandemic did not play to his skill set.
It's always fun to blame the politicians, but in reality, they are a representative government that people voted for. A reflection of ourselves.
The thing is; masks, hand washing, distancing, avoiding crowded places, all these mitigation acts are incremental. None of them by themselves is a proven 100% silver bullet. Is the expectation that anything short of a 100% silver bullet is not worth the sacrifice? Or that any sacrifice at all is a suppression of freedom?
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