What do I think this proves? Nothing really. It’s just interesting to contrast (speculatively) how Americans have responded to COVID, vs. how they’d probably respond to a hydrogen bomb dropped on a large American city.
(Stipulations: yes the numbers are imprecise, yes it doesn’t count fallout, yes there are larger US cities, yes this is mostly a rhetorical exercise. I will refer to this as the T-shirt disclaimer.)
I mean, the Japanese and the rest of the world reacted differently to the nuclear bombs than to the firebombing of city after city, didn’t they?
And we are losing more than a 9/11’s worth of victims every day now. We very well may hit two 9/11’s a day of victims pretty soon here. Yet we started two wars because of 9/11 but won’t put a mask on for COVID.
I take the point, but COVID is not ordinary. That’s sort of my point. It’s the biggest news story every month for the last 11 months. The body count is blasted out on a regular basis and followed by millions if not billions of people worldwide. People are well aware of what’s going on.
The problem is that it’s not ordinary, and people aren’t ignorant about it. They know how many people have died. Yet they’re insisting it’s no big deal, when(by the numbers) it’s actually more deadly to Americans than nuking a major American city.
Sure, but the Spanish Flu killed more people than all of World War I or II, with great public awareness, and yet WW1/2 lasted far longer in culture, history, cinema, museums, art and consciousness than the virus did. It’s just how we’re wired, I guess.
Even assuming the Russians chose to target a single city we limited out initial response to a singe city (neither of these make tactical sense) the situation would inventively escalate to further use of nukes and a Third World War.
It seems very reasonable that people get so preoccupied with 2 major world wars that the pandemic would take a back seat.
Point is, there’s something else going on. COVID kills a September 11th worth of people very day now, and the number is still increasing. It killed as many people as an H-bomb on a large city. Thankfully the world has been free of major conflict, so we have nothing to distract us like the Spanish Flu. Yet many Americans are still acting like it should be life as usual.
Also, returning to this point:
But many Americans actually do believe that COVID was caused by an enemy action. The President himself blames “Red China” and frequently broadcasts that belief on Twitter. Large numbers of his followers believe in the “plandemic”, yet those are the people least likely to take the pandemic seriously!
It’s bizarre, frankly. It makes me think that America should shift its civil defense strategy from shelter and survival, to simply relabeling nuclear attacks as giant earthquake/hurricanes that only affected the population of undesirables.
Another parallel just occurred to me. In days past, people built bomb shelters for nuclear attacks that never came. We held duck-and-cover drills. But although COVID is now a realized threat on the ground, we can’t even get some people to delay a wedding, skip going to bars, or even wear a mask around their neighbors.
And lots couldn’t even be bothered to come out for a drill.
I’m not defending mask refusers, just saying our generation isn’t so unique.
There were a lot who refused to go to shelter during the blitz. You can say this was different because they only risked hurting themselves, but their family might disagree.