I'll just pose another scenario to the utter destruction of the US and any hope for the future listed in a few posts above.
Yep, the US screwed up at the beginning of this crisis. Yep, we have a nutter at the top who is using this epidemic to further polarize this country. Yep, conservatives are ignoring social distancing guidelines as if they were made up by Democrats to "make Trump look bad". This is where we are today and yep, it means that many more will die that would have lived if we had a coherent leader as prez.
But we don't. We have had almost a decade of the same kind of fumbling luddites running most of our states. Those same states are not even close to doing what's necessary to slow its spread.
OTOH, California and Washington both reacted responsibly to the virus and they are in the early stages of seeing improvements. Oregon, set in-between those two economic powers got a whiff of the problem and followed their lead. New York is in agony but they are taking the necessary steps to stop the spread. The virus isn't partisan. It doesn't care what anybody says, knows or how they vote. It feeds on the kind of inaction and lack of care on display in Texas, Florida, Nevada, and other states that have not yet taken steps to stop it. In a matter of weeks, those states are going to be a horror show, while New York begins to heal and California enacts travel restrictions to protect their public from the luddite states. There is no way those states could pretend they weren't warned, either.
So, yeah, we are screwed in the short term. I don't think it's going to last. It's going to last long enough to teach a hard lesson to states that ignored medical scientists. My guess, it's going to be about a year before we can resume the kind of open society we used to be. But the strength of this nation was never in it's banks or stock market, which are about to get hammered down. It's the people who are law abiding, hard working and while we might argue about how smart we are, history shows we are smart enough to work our way through hard times without falling apart. As some falsely predict we will.
The wind is blowing hard on conservatives. They are going to take it hard, both in their numbers, their health and politically. This decade was set to be one of difficult change. Regardless of this epidemic, by the end of this decade, the boomer-dominated society we had going in was going to be exchanged with the more diverse, better educated and tolerant millennial generation. The early part of the 20's were looking to be a bitter cat and dog fight for political control. The fading conservative movement looked to be hardening voter exclusion laws in order to maintain power of a minority white demographic that still held a plurality. This epidemic changes all of that.
I suggest this epidemic moved the hands of the clock of change forward. I think that the epidemic is speeding up the much needed refresh in leadership and social policies that were acutely needed even before this epidemic. I also submit that we are not done for economically. This is still a large country with plenty of resources at its disposal. So, yeah, these are "interesting times". Covid-19 is speeding up change that was already taking place. In a few years, I look forward to living in a less divided, more socially progressive, environmentally conscious and knowledge-driven country. But, yeah, right now, it sucks.
