Serving the High Plains
Serving the High Plains
I have good reasons to be worried about catching the coronavirus.
I fit the demographic profile for the most typical victim — I’m 75 and I have a serious medical precondition.
And here in Los Angeles, where about 4,500 of the state’s 9,000 coronavirus deaths already have occurred, the pandemic is still hanging around.
My immediate family members and I haven’t had so much as a sniffle or cough in four months, but the virus has claimed a few people around me.
The brother of our housekeeper died of the coronavirus in Guatemala. So did his son.
The guard at my wife’s office building told us his sister died of the virus in Iran.
On Thursday we heard the sad news about the death of Herman Cain, the upbeat business executive and author who ran for president in 2012. He lost his long battle against COVID-19 at age 74.
I didn’t need to hear about his death or see the headlines that COVID-19 fatalities in the U.S. have passed 150,000 to be reminded to wear a mask and keep my social distance.
Those precautions are simply something that people like me have to close pay attention to.
I know wearing a face mask — like everything else these days — has become a nasty Red-Blue political issue.
But whether you’re a liberal or conservative, if you feel better when I’m wearing a mask, great.
I know it makes my family feel better, too, because if I’m wearing a mask they know they aren’t going to infect me.
COVID-19 still poses a serious threat to some parts of the country. Though the country’s daily fatality rate is much lower than it was in April, a thousand Americans are still dying from the virus every day.
But as deadly as it is to the very old and already very sick, and as fearsome as it is, the coronavirus is only a short-term national problem.
We’ll eventually get a vaccine — or vaccines — for COVID-19 that will defeat it or keep it under control like the seasonal flu that kills tens of thousands every year.
The biggest fear I have for the future of this country is not from the virus.
It’s from the violent anarchists and outlaws who have hijacked the mostly peaceful Black Lives Matter protest movement and created mobs of mostly young white rioters who are intent on ripping out the hearts of some of our biggest cities.
Whether it’s in New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Seattle or Portland, the anarchists have been given free reign by leftwing Democrat mayors and governors to burn, destroy, occupy and terrorize at will for two months.
The nightly anarchy I see is absolutely terrifying to me.
What kind of America are my granddaughters going to grow up in when mobs are allowed to burn and loot without fear of being arrested or subdued by the police?
That future America is much scarier to me right now than any deadly new virus.
Michael Reagan is the president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Contact him at: