America Debates If the Lives of the Elderly Are As Valuable As A Healthy Economy!?

Word is that Trump is bored with the Covid Crisis and wants to move on to something more interesting to him, like self-serving corruption and golf.  One unintended consequence of Trump’s movement away from his duty and responsibility is a wake of debate over whether the restoration of the economy has more value than the lives of the elderly.  It’s fairly clear that to many Republicans the economy is far more important than the lives of the elderly, and in the mind’s of many, the entire general population.  What will people like this come to decide when the streets of America are overrun by broke snow tops living in tent cities, under viaducts, and in the parks and government land all over the country.  By any reasonable count there will be millions of such penniless elderly Americans in the next decade or so.

When I wrote my novel, Hunting Snow Tops, in the first term of Obama’s presidency these kind of debates would have been deemed absurd first, given no creedence whatsoever, and secondly, if considered, considered highly implausible.  Indeed, at the time, my early draft readers were concerned I was wasting my time with an implausible concept.  I was worried, too, as it seemed a bit far fetched, but I went ahead and created the scenario and wrote the novel.  (You can find the review of Hunting Snow Tops online in Kirkus Reviews.  Check it out!)

Now, less than a decade later, the entire plot is becoming spot on and the debate over the value of old folk’s lives versus the American economy is front and center on the discourse on many cable channels.   Several prominent people with large platforms, like Brit Hume, Bill O’Reilly, Dan Patrick, Rush Limbaugh and Geraldo Rivera believe the Economy is far more important the lives of seniors.  It is now a mainstream conversation, and certainly many of Trump’s followers find themselves falling down on the side of the economy versus their grandparents.

Thus, the once absurd premise of my novel became a reality.  I believe that means that all the other absurd, not so absurd realities in the book may come to pass as well.  The hunting of old people, the rounding of them up, the arrest and imprisonment of the elderly for vagrancy will flood prisons instead of nursing homes.  How else can it end if the first thoughts of many Americans when facing the Covid dilemas of the elderly versus weighing down economy is to say, “Let them die.  Most of them are on their last legs, anyway.  If they love their country they should want to die to help stabalize the economy.  People die everyday.”

(You can find my novel, , on Amazon.  I’m starting to worry that my work of fiction may someday become non-fiction, and even worse will have to serve a survival manual for the elderly.)