This is war

I feel like a lobster.

A lobster in a pot filled with water with the heat being slowly turned up, hardly noticeable at first.

The advance of the deadly coronavirus was like a dream, or a nightmare in slow motion.

Outbreaks in China, on cruise ships, in Korea, then Italy, didn’t mean much. Someone else’s problem. 

Slowly, slowly, slowly, it approached, with our president insisting it would be gone like a summer storm.

A summer storm has never emptied the NCAA championship stands of fans, or suspended the NBA season.

Suspended. The. NBA. Season.

Can hockey and baseball continue to play?

The World Health Organization calls it a global pandemic.

St. Patrick’s Day parades have been cancelled, as well as political rallies and music concerts, such as Coachella. Universities are on early, and unending, spring break.

We now have a virtual wall between the U.S. and Europe. Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson are infected and in Australia.

What we know is that it will get worse, much worse. 

This is something that has never happened to us, all 350 million of us, before. The CDC suspects as many as 150 million Americans may contract the virus and nothing in our 21st Century arsenal seems able to stop it.

If 150 million are infected and an estimated 2% die, that is 3 million dead, more than the total of every war we have ever fought.

People are told to work from home, to avoid crowds in arenas and restaurants and stores are starved of customers. The worst is yet to come.

What do working parents do when their children are prohibited from school and ordered to stay at home? What happens if you are not able to work from home, or your employer shuts down? How do we survive?

This will strike every corner of America, even as the stock market falls into a bear market.

Do we have enough hospital beds and breathing equipment on hand? Can enough be secured, or will we watch hundreds of thousands die while we wring our hands? That can’t be allowed to happen.

Coronavirus is doing what our enemies could not — destroy our economy without firing a shot. We are wobbly and we haven’t yet taken a hard punch.

We have two fronts. We will need a massive infusion of funds to fight the disease on one hand, and to support Americans and American business on the other.

I suggest an immediate “war tax” for the war on coronavirus.

I’ll let Washington figure out who to tax and how much, but it will have to be enormous and come from the deepest pockets.

This is war. We can’t be lobsters.