Your Money or Your Life

I’m sure I’m not the only one who remembers the old Jack Benny joke where a robber points a gun at Benny and says, “Your money or your life!” and Benny replies, “I’m thinking, I’m thinking.”

It seems to me as though this is where we are today, although it is no joke. We are being asked to give up our own, our family’s, our neighbors’ lives to “reopen the economy”.

Yesterday, “Dr” Oz told Sean Hannity that we need to “get our mojo back”. According to Oz, one “appetizing opportunity” (yes those are his words) is to reopen our schools. Oz read an article that says there would only be a 2-3% mortality rate among schoolchildren if we open schools now. According to what I’ve read, 2-3% of schoolchildren is approximately 1.5 million kids. Way to “get our mojo back” on the deaths of over a million children! What a compassionate “doctor”.

In addition, a republican in Indiana, Trey Hollingsworth, says that reopening the economy is “lesser of two evils”. He has walked that statement back somewhat, but his default is that we need to “reopen the economy”. If people die because we opened it too soon, oh well… The way I understand that statement is, “if some people have to lose their lives, so that I can keep my money, so be it.”

Basically, that’s the same thing anyone who wants to reopen the economy is saying. My or yours or your family’s or your neighbors’ life/lives is not more important than his money. Just for the record, though, I’m trying to understand what good your money will do if you’re already dead, which leads me to the conclusion that it’s MY death needed to save HIS money. After all, which is more important?

Here’s what I know. We have had terrible economies before, and we have recovered. We will recover from this terrible economy. It may not be soon, it may not be to the level we had before, it may not be before the November election (which is what “reopening the economy”) is all about, but we WILL recover.

What will NOT recover is all the people who have died so that the economy recovers. Let me take that one step further, while I’m at it. What will the economy look like once it’s recovered? Will it look like the screenshot I saw the other day on fox-so-called-news where the pundit had a chart next to his head that showed the stock market having the largest one-day gain while at the bottom a chyron ran that showed 16 million Americans were unemployed? IOW, is it recovery that Wall Street is booming while Main Street is suffering? Will all of those unemployed people miraculously get their jobs back? Or will employers cut back under the guise of “recovering”? What about all those small businesses that have gone out of business? Will they be able to open again? Will they able to hire all of their employees back? Will they be able to pay them? All of this is for another article, of course, and really has no answers until it happens.

So, back to my original question. Which is it? Your money or your life? And a thousand poxes on the TLB for getting us to this point where we even have to ask this question.