Again, The Story Changes

When the shutdown started, we were told it was about “flattening the curve.” Not so much about preventing people from getting the virus as it was about stretching those cases out over a period of time so that our health care system would not be overwhelmed.

So now that the health care system has been rather massively underwhelmed and the number of cases is declining, we are told that the shutdown cannot be terminated because if we do then a lot of people will catch the disease.

That’s like running your furnace to keep your house warm in the winter and then, when the weather gets warmer, insisting that you have to keep running the furnace because if you stop you will bankrupt the company that provides fuel for your furnace.

(In case you’re missing my point, supporting the fuel company is not why you were running your furnace. You were doing so because the weather was cold, and now that the weather is warm you can stop.)

In the same vein, if we were doing the shutdown to avoid overwhelming the health care system, now that the health care system is clearly not overwhelmed, and clearly will not be, we can end the shutdown. But instead of ending it, government wants to continue it, and is now giving us a different reason for doing so.