Kansas official on COVID-19: ‘Let’s everybody get the damn thing and get it over with’
Remember when conservatives used to argue that every single life had value? I used to like that about them.
But now that our economy is on the line in this pandemic, the argument is suddenly just the opposite: We’re all going to die anyway, so what difference does it make if some of us — almost 45,000 Americans so far, but whatever — check out early because of COVID-19?
As Mark Hatesohl, a city commissioner in Manhattan, Kansas, said at a meeting on Tuesday, “I’m almost to the point where it’s like, let’s everybody get the damn thing and get it over with.”
“There are more important things than living,” according to Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who previously said that old people should take one for the team, or something. “Nobody wants to die,” Patrick told Tucker Carlson on his Fox News show. “But man, we got to take some risks and get back in the game.”
Open everything back up first, in other words, and worry about the consequences later. A protester’s sign in Olympia, Washington, put it this way: “Give me liberty, or give me COVID-19.”
I hope that guy does not get his death wish.
But those in leadership roles, including Hatesohl, a chiropractor and former Manhattan mayor, have a special responsibility to stop screaming that we’re overreacting in our response to the coronavirus, when that couldn’t be further from the truth.
“You can’t go through life staying 6 feet away from everybody so you won’t get a version of the cold,” Hatesohl said at the meeting. “Sick people might pass away,” he allowed. “But we can’t keep acting like we can’t do anything ever because somebody might get the COVID.”
He also questioned how many people have really died due to the pandemic: “Oh, if you had a cough, it was due to COVID when you died from pneumonia because you smoked your whole life.” Most of those who are sick “are resting comfortably at home,” Hatesohl said, which would come as a surprise to overwhelmed hospital workers.
And we might find out that “people have a better immunity out here in Kansas,” though no, no one has immunity to this new disease, and there have so far been 2,211 cases and 110 deaths in the state.
The virus is just not impacting Hatesohl’s college town the way it’s affecting “liberal Kansas City and Wichita,” aka Sodom and Gomorrah. Remember when conservatives used to be the adults at the party, instead of the ones urging potentially fatal risk-taking, because what the heck?
When I reached Hatesohl at his chiropractic office, the first thing he said was, “Oh, sh-t.” But instead of walking anything back, he repeated that we shouldn’t be living timidly when only 1 or 2% of those who get COVID-19 are going to die.
“We’re Americans,” he said. “We’re here to be free, not to be safe, living bold and free instead of cowering in the basement, afraid of the bogeyman.”
He had spoken in frustration at the meeting, he said. “Nobody wants everybody to frigging get sick, but stop acting like, ‘Oh my God! I’m going to die!’ The disease isn’t killing everybody that gets it, and we need to let people decide for themselves how much risk they’re willing to take.”
The problem with that argument, of course, is that these bolder, freer Americans are not only taking the risk for themselves, but for others, since they could be sick without knowing it and pass the coronavirus on.
Hatesohl has lost 60% of his income in this thing, and is pretty sure that everybody urging caution — preaching panic, as he sees it — hasn’t lost anything.
Well, not true. Like so many others, I have family members who are struggling to hang on to small businesses built with love over a lifetime. And one of the industries hardest hit by this pandemic is local news, since advertising revenues plummeted overnight. Materially and financially, our interest is the same as Mark Hatesohl’s and Dan Patrick’s and every protester’s.
Lives are still more important, though. How many more do we have to lose before we remember that?
This story was originally published April 23, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
