I first posted this last September. Many closures happened since then.
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Who’s Line Is It Anyway? was/is a television show first hosted by Drew Carey. The show’s ensemble cast was gifted at improv humor.
Drew’s favorite line was something like:
“Welcome to the show where everything’s made up, and the points don’t matter.”
Several parts of the United States’ response to the current pandemic remind me of that line. Today I focus on one such situation:
Episode 3: Actually two lines…
During the course of the “pandemic,” two descriptors were used as excuses to wreak havoc on society as a whole.
Essential and non-essential
- Essential businesses, jobs, and surgeries were allowed to continue with little, if any, disruption.
- Non-essential iterations of those same categories were shut down, some of them for months.
There are problems with this abuse of power by our governmental agencies at all levels.
First Line
No surgery is essential. All surgery is elective.
Several types of surgery are performed so often that they seem essential. If any surgery was genuinely essential,
every human being
would require that surgery to live.
There is no such surgery.
Some surgeries listed as non-essential are probably considered that by most people.
- Plastic surgery might sound like a non-essential procedure until you consider that many plastic surgeries are not for the perceived enhancement or refinement of a healthy body.
- Amputees and burn victims usually require several to many surgeries to increase, improve, or allow physical activities.
Postponing cancer surgeries or other surgeries intended to improve the condition of patients led to dire consequences for many.
- However, as unfeeling as this sounds, even if a person died as a result of postponed surgery, that doesn’t mean the surgery was essential.
- Every human life ends in physical death.
When a government decides who deserves immediate surgery and who can wait, they far overstep their boundaries.
Second line
No job is non-essential. Every job is critically important to someone.
- If a person’s job provides money for her/his family to live, how can that job be considered non-essential?
- To that person, her/his job is essential to living as a productive member of society.
Imagine your job was declared non-essential and you were laid off or your business was shut down. (I apologize to those reading this who don't have to imagine that situation.)
- What does that imply?
More importantly, what was shown to be the reality of such arbitrary designations. According to a YELP survey
- 60% of businesses that shut down in the US from the start of the pandemic as of August 31 won't be reopening, Yelp said Wednesday.
- As of 31 August, 163,735 US businesses have shut down, a 23% rise since mid-July.
- Yelp said the restaurant industry was most heavily affected with closures totaling 32,109 as of August 31.
- Fortune magazine reported 100,000 small businesses shut down permanently by September 28, 2020.
Not a single one of those businesses considered itself non-essential...
BECAUSE THEY WEREN'T NON-ESSENTIAL,
AND NOW LIVES AND COMMUNITIES
ARE CHANGED FOREVER.
Sadly, “Welcome to the show where everything’s made up…” fits governmental ignorance and arrogance in their treatment of both this week’s lines perfectly.
Even sadder, the points did matter in these cases.
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