Bad Data
There’s a line out of Zane Grey’s novel “Riders Of the Purple Sage” that stuck with me when I first read the book some years ago. Lassiter is telling Jane Withersteen that the older he got, the stranger life seemed. I am finding that is certainly the case with me. Life, or people around us, can act real strange, especially when things get tough to deal with, such as buying all the toilet paper and paper towels inside the store. Now, I hear on the radio that we’re in a serious meat shortage. So, I guess if you have a large freezer you’d better buy all the meat you can ‘cause you never know when you’re going to eat your next pork chop or hamburger. I’m just waiting to hear what new thing I’m supposed to be in a shortage of and how worried I’m supposed to be.
It really is strange the way people react when put under a little pressure. Just the mere prediction of the devastation the virus could inflict on humans for instance, causes some people to act as though the end of the world is at hand. I caught a little of this on the radio. Only in this case they were trying their best to explain why the number of sick and the dead was so much lower than what they had been predicting. Really? That’s not hard to explain, unless you’re not telling the truth in the first place. The truth is they fed a bunch of bad data into their computers and got a lot of bad data back. Those numbers were what they based their predictions on…bad data. Try telling the public the truth once in a while and see what happens.
I’m not saying we should throw all caution to the wind and live like nothing’s wrong. There is a virus and it’s making some people very ill and killing others. But I am saying that most problems could be solved by allowing people to reopen their stores and run their business without going to jail or being fined. After all, this is America and most Americans are pretty good at solving problems by themselves when left alone. Maybe we should give it a try.
