57% Okay with 170K+ Dead

I read an astonishing statistic that approximately 57% of Republicans think 170K+ deaths are acceptable. About 73% think the handling of the coronavirus has gone really well. Here’s an article relaying those statistics and more but that article wasn’t the article that I first found that shocking 57% statistic. No, I read it somewhere else. Here’s the other article that I think I read.

Wow. Republicans are okay with this level of deaths and we’re now over 195K, very close to 200K and projected to be 400K by the end of the year. And they think it’s been going pretty well. (I just checked the statistics: it looks like we’ve breached the 200K threshold. Sad!)

Just double wow.

We are really living in two different worlds with different value systems. The Republicans fight for the lives of the unborn (which I understand) but then appear to not care about those already alive. It’s hard to square those two ideas. There is an impression of callousness or indifference.

My understanding is that the Republican party is generally the party of business, so maybe the Milton Friedman’s doctrine that the sole purpose of a corporation is to maximize profits, and as a side effect, make money solely for the shareholders, has seeped into the very soul of the Republican party. In order to focus strictly on the bottom line and push down the wages or do a lots of layoffs during hard times, one must develop a thick calloused skin towards the plight of ordinary workers, which is most of us. Having lived for 3 or 4 decades under that profit maximizing philosophy, that callousness may be so deeply embedded into how we view lives in general: expendable. I don’t know…I’m just trying to understand why it is okay to have 190K plus lives dead so we can walk around without masks and do away with social distancing. I understand about the need for keeping businesses open but can’t we keep them open and include masks and social distancing? So, we can save lives?

I had thought the pandemic might move the Republican voter but it looks like it won’t. Nothing moves them. Is it because they truly don’t like the “others” and maybe view “others” as subhuman, thus those deaths do not mean anything to them? Blacks and people of color have suffered most of the deaths, so maybe that is why the high death count is okay. They just don’t care.

At least that is how it looks.

Would they change their minds if it had been their own family? I don’t know. I was reading about the pastor in Idaho who told his congregants that they could attend church without masks or social distancing because it is their right to attend church mask-free and without rules. Then he came down with a severe case of the coronavirus that put him in the ICU. His wife – I don’t know about the pastor himself – but his wife now says that they had not taken the virus seriously. So, she changed her mind. The pastor – I’m not sure.

But I’d rather they understand the seriousness of the virus before getting it themselves, especially if it puts them in ventilator territory. Going under ventilator usually means the odds of death rise dramatically – people under ventilators don’t do well. I don’t want them to get to the point of near death before they see the light – by then, it might be too late.