It’s all doom and gloom on the news right now. A deadly pandemic is rampaging through America. There are riots and looting across the land in response to the death of George Floyd. The economy is in such terrible shape that it’s like time-traveling back to year six of the Obama presidency. Calamity! Woe! Or, as Shakespeare might have put it: Alack and wellaway! Are things really that bad in America right now? Actually, no.
For the vast majority of Americans, the stuff dominating our television screens for the past three months and including the last week is about as far removed from our daily lives as watching a live NASA feed on the moon.
The vast majority of places to live in America have not suffered much, if at all, from the Chinese coronavirus. And the vast majority of places to live in America are not beset by riots right now.
Most people don’t realize this, but 85% of the towns in the United States have a population that is less than 10,000 in number. There’s a good chance that you live in one of those places. By contrast, an average of 5.6 million people jumps on the subway in New York City every week.
If you only get your news about America by watching the national media, it does look tremendously gloomy right now. But in the vast majority of towns across America, we don’t know anyone who has had the coronavirus and we don’t see smoke on the horizon from the looting hordes that are stealing quarts of milk from a Starbucks before setting it on fire.
The media has been proclaiming for three weeks now that “100,000” Americans have died from coronavirus. This was strange when it started, because the official CDC tally was approximately 80,000 casualties. No one knows where that 100,000 figure came from. As of June 1, the CDC is finally reporting 100,000 casualties, but we all know that this is inflated. George Floyd was COVID positive at the time of his death so you know they counted him as one of the coronavirus deaths.
The New York Times ran a stunt article recently in which it filled the front page with the names of people “killed by Trump’s inaction” on coronavirus. But one of the very first names at the top of the page was a person who was shot to death in March. We’ll probably never know the true number of coronavirus fatalities in America because the numbers have been so fudged. What we do know is that the overreaction was worse than the virus, which is actually not much worse, if any, than an annual flu season.
My family is spread out all across this great country, from California to Rhode Island and from Alaska to Florida. None of them know a person who has had the Chinese coronavirus and none of them personally know of anyone who has died from it. It’s really not very doomy or gloomy for most of America.
Here is the proof that the vast majority of America is doing pretty okay right now: The cities with stupid leaders that imposed the most restrictive and repressive coronavirus lockdowns… are the exact same cities that are now being looted and burned. Instead of a Venn diagram with a few overlaps, it’s an exact overlap. If you live in a place that didn’t issue a restrictive local lockdown, there’s no rioting taking place where you live right now. What a weird coincidence!
The only real and present danger that people face in the immediate area where I live right now is a wildfire danger, as our patriotic neighbors are already setting off tons of fireworks – every single night – in anticipation of the Fourth of July. This is just an estimate on my part, but last year, I think my neighbors spent approximately $700 million on Fourth of July fireworks (which are totally illegal here due to local ordinance). No one cares about that rule and the police don’t enforce it anyway.
Meanwhile, no around us is in sick and no one’s business is in danger of being burned to the ground. The vast majority of us live in the real America: smaller towns that are totally immune to the virus panic and/or the riots consuming Democrat-run cities. Things are actually pretty good. We have a lot of good things to look forward to this summer, as the economy rebounds.
