How irresponsible behavior hurts the economic recovery

Convincing the undecided…

Political cartoons have been described as “art on an errand” and I wish I said that or had some clue who did.

Anyway…

Political cartoons express an opinion – or at least the good ones do – and if I’ve learned anything in four-plus decades of drawing them, they rarely change anybody’s mind.

If you’re a Donald Trump supporter, me telling you he’s an idiot is unlikely to change your opinion. If you already think Trump’s an idiot, a conservative cartoonist telling you he isn’t probably won’t make you see him in a new light.

So if drawing political cartoons rarely changes anybody’s opinion, why keep drawing them?

Well, there’s the money (which used to be pretty good), cartoons are fun to draw and drawing cartoons for a living is way better than being the night manager at a Taco Bell which is just about the only other job I’m qualified to handle.

But after drawing a whole bunch of cartoons and listening to people’s reaction, I eventually understood that I probably wasn’t going to change a true believer’s mind; my true target was the undecided.

And oddly enough, that brings us to the Lake of the Ozarks pool party.

If you want people to join you, quit being an idiot

If you’re convinced the coronavirus is a sham, social distancing is unnecessary and over 100,000 Americans have faked their own deaths, there’s not much I can say that will change your mind.

But if you want to go back to normal it would help if you behaved responsibly in public. An economic recovery will require as many people as possible to participate and for a lot of people they’ll have to feel safe before they go back to normal; you have to convince the undecided to join in.

Lake of the Ozark pool parties don’t help.

People see stuff like that and decide maybe they’ll hold out a bit longer until natural selection wipes a few more knuckleheads out of the herd. (Unfortunately, the knuckleheads might survive the coronavirus and manage to transmit COVID-19 to somebody who behaved a little more responsibly.)

In my own case, I was thinking of getting a haircut just about the same time two hairdressers here in Missouri decided to show up for work even though they had COVID-19 symptoms and managed to potentially expose over 100 other people to the virus.

After that, I decided to skip my part in reviving the economy, cut my own hair and live with the result. If I got the virus and croaked, having people walk by my coffin saying, “But doesn’t his hair look nice” didn’t seem like adequate compensation.

The bully pulpit

As Donald Trump is slowly finding out, there’s a lot of stuff presidents can’t do and powers they don’t have, but one power they do have is the “bully pulpit.” According to the internet: a position of authority that provides it occupant an opportunity to speak out on any issue.

Good leaders lead by example and by that standard Donald Trump is a lousy leader.

Take face masks; he refuses to follow the recommendations of his own medical experts and when he walks around breathing on everybody it makes it more acceptable for others to do the same thing. His behavior is actually making an economic recovery less likely.

Right now we have too many people doing whatever the hell they want and as long as that goes on the people who are undecided about rejoining society are going to hang back until they feel safe.

If you want the economy to recover – if you want to get back to normal – it would help if you behaved responsibly in public and maybe the undecided will join you.

Me?

I’m not undecided and I think I’m going to keep cutting my own hair for a while.

Stay safe, everybody.