Food for Thought:
Here are some people who are useless, especially now: Performance artists, diversity consultants, magic crystal healers, sociology TAs, members of the mainstream media, and gender-unspecified entities who brew kale kombucha.
So writes Schlichter at Townhall.
We are used to living in a rich society where people embrace all sort of frivolous ideas, but maybe the coronavirus is forcing us to get serious.
Maybe movie stars still see themselves as sages, and a former presidential candidate still sees farmers as not as smart as he is. But most of us realize that in serious times such as these, elite self-aggrandizement is suddenly more than ever silly and distasteful.
The coronavirus crisis is forcing us to rethink civil value. It’s the workers whom the elites might have regarded as their social inferiors (deplorables) who are proving our heroes and heroines.
In other words, the coronavirus crisis is “exposing who’s irreplaceable,” as the headline on a Victor Davis Hanson column puts it. I want to quote the conclusion of the column at some length:
I think one of the strangest of all sequelae to the virus and the lockdowns might be the millions of high-paid Americans whose absences were hardly missed either by the public or count much in subsequent economic analyses of damage to the economy.
In a sophisticated society under lockdown, is it more existentially valuable to know how to fix a toilet, replace a circuit breaker, or change a tire, or to be a New York fashion designer, a Hollywood actor, or a corporate merger lawyer? At 9 p.m., when you go downtown in need of a critical prescription, are you really all that furious that a law-abiding citizen who has a gun and concealed permit is also in line—or would you be more relieved that gun control laws might ensure that his ilk never enters an all-night pharmacy?
So who is important and who not?
We were often told globalized elites on the coast were the deserved 21st-century winners, while the suckers and rubes in-between had better learn coding or head to the fracking fields.
But who now is more important than the trucker who drives 12-hours straight to deliver toilet paper to Costco? Or the mid-level manager of Target who calibrates supply and demand and is on the phone all day juggling deliveries before his store opens?
Or the checker at the local supermarket who knows that the hundreds of customers inches away from her pose risks of infection, and yet she ensures that people walk out with food in their carts?
The farmworker who is on the tractor all night to ensure that millions of carrots and lettuce don’t rot? The muddy frackers in West Texas who make it possible that natural gas reaches the home of the quarantined broker in Houston? The ER nurse on her fifth coronavirus of the day who matter-of-factly saves lives?
Meanwhile and quite pathetically, Madonna has done a bizarre video featuring the 61-year-old in the bathtub with rose petals skimming the water. She proclaims the coronavirus “the great equalizer” and prattles on about what is “wonderful” and what is “terrible” about the virus.
It is a kind of decadence that takes your breath away.
The virus may be leveling, but not quite in the way that Madonna believes.
No, no, Madonna, the coronavirus is not making such narcissistic displays in any way equal to what the farmer or the tractor driver does.
We are beginning to see that formerly unappreciated people are heroes, contributing to our wellbeing, even at risk to their own health.