Sunday Morning Post (V.2 #10): Greetings from Montgomery County!

(EDITORS NOTE: We must admit at the outset that we had reservations about publishing this entry when Arteejee submitted it to us for editing.)

As you may remember, the last two entries were full of despondency and anxiety.  Well, fear not!  Those moods are gone.  The bad news: it appears that he has made a 180 degree turn in the other direction and…well, perhaps its best if we put it out there and you decide.

Greetings from Montgomery County, one and all! Home to the largest mall (King of Prussia, by actual retail square footage) in North America!  Also, the epicenter of the newly minted Coronavirus pandemic in the state of Pennsylvania!  Yay and yahoo!

Pennsylvania officials have identified 19 confirmed cases* of Coronavirus in Montco, and a number of others have been tested.  All are quarantined and the governor declared schools should be closed for two weeks.  This was also the signal for every adult in the county to suddenly lose their minds, instinctively switch on their mob mentality, and race to the stores to stock up/hoard every food and cleaning supply they could think of!

I actually walked into this panic, not having heard what the governor had declared.   I thought I could just walk in, gather up two weeks of cat food, and walk out.  Ha!  I now know I was extremely naïve to make such assumptions, but I’ll save the details for another time.

The next day, the governor closed all of the schools in the state in an effort to contain the virus.  After all, why should Montgomery County have all the fun!

We couldn’t have done it without the outright neglect and indifference to public health by the current regime.  It was, after all, the President’s administration who defunded a government agency (created by that Obama guy during the Ebola outbreak) which would have monitored and identified the Coronavirus as a possible epidemic months before now.   Now, as last week demonstrated, we’re trying to catch up real fast.

American business kept a close eye on the situation as the first virus cases were reported on the west coast.  Then Wall Street got all panicky and started selling off everything.  One day it was a few percentage points, followed by a slight recovery as investors bought stocks at bargain basement prices.  The President gave a national address to reassure his beloved ones on Wall Street.  He announced travel restrictions to keep that “foreign disease” from spreading, tried to advise people that anyone could get tested for the disease if they wanted to be tested, and he was thinking about suspending payroll taxes until after the election.

The speech was meant to reassure everyone that his administration was on top of the situation.  No one was assured and the next day the stock market had its worst performance since 1987, dropping over 2,000 points in one day.

Mayday!  Mayday!  Mayday!

Please don’t take our word for it.  Let’s go to our reporter on the floor of stock exchange.

Oh dear!  He seems to be taking the stock market difficulties a bit too seriously.  You’d think that he was the one that had $2,000 evaporate from his 401k account in the last two weeks!

The closure announcements started the next day.  First it was the schools, followed by non-essential businesses, then government buildings.  The federal government announced the closure of the Senate and House office buildings to the public until the end of the month.   Federal workers – staffers and members of Congress - will probably be told to stay home next.   How will day-to-day working of government look?   Perhaps we should look in on CSPAN for a clue.

Well, that didn’t look good.  Either the senator has caught the virus, or CSPAN has opted to show Mr. Smith Goes to Washington in a continuous loop until everyone comes back to work.  Actually, given the current state of our dysfunctional government today, Mr. Smith is more reassuring than reality television at this point.  I get the vibe that our system will survive…even if we human beings don’t survive.

On second thought, don’t come near Montgomery County and stay home for a few weeks.   We’re closed: our schools and the malls.  Yes, even King of Prussia!

*as of Saturday afternoon, March 14, 2020.

(Thank you for reading.  No Wall Street tycoons were harmed in the production of this post.  Lucky them!)