I WANT CORONAVIRUS!
Okay folks, enough is enough. I want coronavirus. I've been watching all the personal stories of the folks who have gotten it and the overwhelming testimony is pretty simple: a day of sniffles, another day of fatigue, then a couple of days of recovery, and life is back to normal.
Goodness, the common cold often knocks people worse than that. It's actually not that strong. But it's new; it's novel. Because of that, nobody has built-up immunities to it. Once we have immunities, like to the flu, we'll be fine with it, just like we are with the flu.
Okay, then, bring it on. I'm healthy, so I want it to get immune and allay my concerns. This mass hysteria among the general populace won't help us get through it; it'll just postpone the immunity exercise. Are precautions important? Absolutely, especially if you have a compromised immune system, either from health, diet, age, or lifestyle. So I'm not advocating complete unconcern; I am suggesting everyone who is healthy, just go on about your daily life and don't worry about it.
We're learning a lot about modern society with this thing. One is how easy it is to control people. The second is how easy it is to whip people into paranoia.
If we could have this level of attention placed on factory farming or Coca-Cola or McDonald's or the economic devastation of the lottery and Las Vegas, my, wouldn't we have a different country? But because all of those horrible things have been with us for a long time, we've grown accustomed to them and they merit nary a bobble.
Our Polyface restaurant sales (we service about 50 restaurants) tanked this week, which accounts for half of our egg sales. We're looking at throwing away perhaps 10-20,000 dozen eggs. That's a year-crippling loss. And that's just one little business in one little corner. Are life and economics related? Absolutely.
We know we can drop traffic deaths on interstates by about 3,000 a year every 5 mile-per-hour drop in speed. That's a well known traffic fatality fact. But we're happy to abide the extra deaths for the economic advantage of time. Don't anybody sit around in sanctimonious holiness and say one life is worth destroying the culture. It's not.
Here on the farm, we make economic judgments about life every day. How much do we invest in saving that sick cow? In fact, my family knows not to resuscitate me for any reason. If I have a heart attack today, let me go. Now if I have an accident, like cut my arm with the chain saw, that's a different story. I'd like to survive that. But I have no desire to burden my loved ones with years of care just to squeak out another few years of breathing. This sounds harsh and hard, but it's also harsh and hard to watch aspiring young entrepreneurs in food trucks lose their dreams over a 2-month hysteria about a new virus that inconveniences the vast majority of people for a couple of days. Or struggling restaurant servers unable to earn an income.
We have struggling restaurants that will go out of business over this. We may throw away $70,000 worth of perfectly wonderful eggs over this. How does that respect the hens that went to all that work to lay them, the labor that fed and gathered them, the folks who kept the electricity going so they could be refrigerated?
I'm beginning to get angry that people so quickly roll over and go into a helpless fetal position. Invest in vitamin C. I wonder how many people fighting over toilet paper have a stash of Coca-Cola in their house? How about taking this imposed quarantine to put in some garden beds and revamp the pantry so it can hold an entire larder's worth of food?
Here at Polyface, we invite anyone who wants to super-charge their micro-biome to come out to the farm, roll around in the compost pile, walk barefoot through the pasture, pick up a chicken and rub her feathers--and take home 10 dozen eggs. Let's get life into ourselves rather than death through sanitizers and anti-microbials.
Is a life worth $1 billion?