b'Editorrelief of our fear of the virus and boiling anger that we have sunk the U.S. economy unnecessarily, is that the sickness and mortality rates are also exponentially lower than we have been told. The real pain, the pain that has absolutely no direct connection whatsoever to the coronavirus, is only beginning, and far more Americans will suffer from a crashed economy than from the diseaseinfinitely more. If the current shutdown of the U.S. economy continues for much longer, in weeks we will be asking, What virus? Poverty, homelessness, hunger and crime will dwarf Covid-19 in the United States. The statewide shutdown in Texas by Governor Greg Abbott, closing schools, bars and restaurants and canceling all major gatherings, first impacted Austins annual South by Southwest music and film festival, delivering a roundhouse kick to the Central Texas economy along with the jobs that came with the festival.The U.S. has shed over 20 million jobs in less than a month. Retirement ac-counts and the publicly-owned wealth of our industrial base has lost 25% of its value. U.S. GDP is projected to go from growing at 3%, to plummeting by 30% in one quarter. The American economy has never, not even going into the Great De-pression, crashed so hard and so fast, all at once. Most of the people who have lost their jobs were at the bottom end of the income scale, which means their situations became immediately desperateand the vast gulf that exists between the income classes has never been so shockingly glaring in any of our lifetimes. We have truly not seen anything like this, and it was 100% preventable at all levels.The very concept of locking down as much of the American population as pos-sible should never have been considered an option. Italy did it, and they dropped like fliesso lets do that. Sweden didnt do it. South Korea didnt do it. The likely result is that the United States of America, through its sensationalized news me-dia and overreactive elected officials, who were bewildered and unprepared and whose public health consultants have proven inept, could be marking the begin-ning of our end as the worlds last economic and military superpower. Were about to be an average country.Rome ruled their known world for 500 years but eventually fell.Covid-19 was never a threat to wipe out America, but our reaction to it might.HISTORY SHALL REMEMBER US NEITHER FOR STABILITY NOR GENIUS.We will survive this, most of us at least. Before Hurricane Harvey, this publication was a tourists guide to the Coastal Bend. When the storm wiped out more than half of our advertisers, and most of our readers were no longer coming, we had no choice but to broadly expand our audience by publishing content that we locals re-ally cared about and were interested inand I think we did. Our first issue as The Coastal Bend Magazine, published at the end of 2017, featured the experience of many of our neighbors on Mustang Island suffering and surviving Harvey. So, in a very real way, that difficult time is saving our business now.The people we Americans have put in charge have failed us in ways none of us could have made up in our wildest imaginations. Those wise men who conceived the U.S. Constitution, though flawed, understood the requisites for a free and fair society, led by a government of the People. The one and only profession that is expressly empowered in the Constitution is The Press, the Fourth Estate, and the reason is because politicians lie, cheat, steal, and screw up all the time, and they can in no way be counted on to police themselves. The Press is our check.So much of the behavior we have seen by national news media during this crisis, which lead most local news media by the nose, is a violation of the trust we should expect to have in them. All news media downplayed the threat Covid-19 was to the U.S., but Fox News flipped about a week later than the others, taking their signals from the White House. Trump was criticized for repeating what the media had stopped saying two weeks earlier, that the seasonal flu kills tens of thousands of people every year, and so this was no more of a threat than that. Although Co-vid-19 is a new virus, and largely an unknown thanks to the worlds misplaced trust in the Chinese government, he may turn out to be right. In 2017-18, the flu season was the worst in 40 years, with 80,000 dying of influenza or complications from the disease. Now that it is becoming apparent that Covid-19 is as contagious 30 THE COASTAL BEND MAGAZINEQ2.2020 TheCoastalBend.com'