It's certain COVID-19 will change everything but this needs to change most of all
Australians seem to understand the need for national self sufficiency. The US should too.
Go nationalism!
Read the rest at the link.Social distancing is the defining phrase of 2020 but next year will bring a new one: self-reliance.
The fact that we live on an island is about to etched into the psyche of every Australian as we spend the rest of the year locked inside our borders. And if liberation depends on a vaccine, mooted to be 10 to 18 months off, then the travel bans might stretch well into next year.
Locked in our homes we will have time to contemplate just how dangerous the world can be and to ponder what things are essential to life. We will have time to consider the way we structured our economy, the essential role of government and the idiocy of outsourcing vital manufacturing connected by just-in-time supply lines.
The longer home detention lasts, the more permanent the economic damage will be and the more the households of Australia will rebel. What can’t be known is how they will direct their anger.
But it’s a fair bet that the bulk of the population has got some key messages: that this threat came from China, that its totalitarian regime’s first reaction was to lie and that Australia is far too reliant on an unreliable nation.
As this column has noted before historians will argue over which was worse, the disease or the cure. The crushing recession spawned by the deliberate radical shutdown of our economy by our governments is just beginning. Because the rest of the world is applying the same medicine this could evolve into a second Great Depression that will take many more lives than the disease; through war, civil disorder, murder, suicide, domestic violence and lives shortened by poverty and despair.