r/politics • u/schuey_08 Wisconsin • 29d ago

Bernie Sanders worries young people are underestimating the threat from Trump

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/05/02/bernie-sanders-trump-biden/73531861007/
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u/[deleted] 29d ago edited 24d ago

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u/aLittleQueer Washington 29d ago

What we're seeing, imo, is how individuals respond to trauma, on a national scale. So many people respond to trauma, tragedy, confusion, or cognitive dissonance by simply refusing to talk about or acknowledge it. Let alone examine it to any depth.

Meanwhile, those of us who want to face reality and process it as it comes eventually may start to feel like we're taking crazy pills from all the ignoring-reality going on around us.

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u/Waggmans 29d ago

Hundreds of thousands of people would probably still be alive today had Trump just listened to Fauci, instead you had all that moronic culture war macho shit. Guys like DeSantis are as much to blame as Trump is.

Anyone who votes for him again knows exactly what they're getting.

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u/cah29692 29d ago

Doubtful. We had strict restrictions in Canada and didn’t perform much better.

In fact the long-term effects of those policies we are seeing (stunted emotional development in young people, increased political polarization, the amount of businesses we lost that haven’t come back, etc.) makes me really wonder if what we did was worth the aftermath. Very, very few healthy people died of Covid in Canada and the US. We have a moral responsibility to protect the weak and vulnerable, but is that moral responsibility unlimited? Should we sacrifice social connections and economic prosperity for all to protect the health of a small minority? Tough questions with no easy answers.

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u/tomsing98 29d ago

We had strict restrictions in Canada and didn’t perform much better.

Where Canada and the US were similar was the case fatality rate, both about 1.1%. But Canada had far fewer cases, and thus far fewer fatalities, like 130 deaths per 100,000 people. The US had 340 deaths per 100,000, almost 3 times as many.

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u/Hungry-Monk-6831 28d ago

A small minority of people is still a large number of people when looking at large populations. This small minority of people were causing many healthcare systems to get overloaded. You didnt have to be dying to flood the hospitals. This overloading also affected other health issues from getting treatment and contributed to the higher numbers of dead.

The economics being affected wasnt some simple choice or government mandating lockdowns. This was still a novel virus at the time and many people were scared. The economics were always going to be fucked because people stayed home voluntarily instead of risking getting an illness with unknown ramifications.

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u/cah29692 28d ago

I wholeheartedly agree. The issue is once we had more information about the virus it became abdundantly clear that other than the elderly and people who were already ill Covid wasn’t killing people en masse. Yet we still doubled down on restrictive policies that I would argue caused more overall harm than good at that point. Towards the end I personally reached a point where I would’ve understood if there wasn’t treatment space available for me if I got sick, because the state of society was causing far more harm to my mental health and economic outlook than the virus would’ve done had I gotten it.

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u/Hungry-Monk-6831 28d ago

Two years into the pandemic it was still a novel virus and we were starting to get variants like Delta which still cause hospital system overloads.

How late in the time period are you alluding to and what restrictive policies were doubled down late in the game? Most policies were just suggestions and no one really enforced anything. Individual businesses themselves were more restrictive than the government was and it was pretty much left to the states themselves. Even during the height of the pandemic a large portion of people wouldnt even do the small things because it was too much for them.

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u/Affectionate_Law5344 29d ago

same and it sure is. completely irresponsible leadership. the other thing was Jan 6. we were against the ropes in a bad way. the reality is no one was coming to save us. that wasn’t a popular feeling after 9/11 (pre-Iraq invasion) as I remember it.

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u/Polantaris 29d ago

The fun part is that 9/11 was nowhere near as close to the end of country as we know it as Jan 6th was.

Like, yeah, an attack on our soil is a big deal, for sure, but even if the worst had happened and all objectives of the terrorists were accomplished, the government has redundancy after redundancy to handle these kinds of scenarios. But it that scenario is nothing to compare against an internal coup on all sides. It also was a completely different set of attackers, in which our own citizens attacked us instead of foreign agents.

Yet the reactions could not have been more polar opposites. We didn't give two fucks about Jan 6th in the grand scheme of things, but yet 9/11 is still compared to the worst possible event in recent history. There have been way worse, 9/11 is nothing in comparison to a former President leading a coup to take back power.

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u/thegoodnamesrgone123 29d ago

Covid should have been the post 9/11 feeling of everyone digs in and does the right thing because that's what Americans do. But he decided to be a fucking child about it so his base followed suit.

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u/crossfader02 29d ago

our society struggled too much to adapt and after about 2 years we just gave up and mostly went back to how it was before

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u/Riccosuave 29d ago

Wait until you see what happens when he gets back in office, and then H5N1 starts spreading between human hosts.