It has been a whirlwind month for the Midwestern rancher, Arthur Worchestire. First he was told he would literally die if he didn’t lock himself in his basement and wrap his head in tin foil. Then it was revealed to him that the Big Apple, that is New York for you culturally illiterate types, was facing one of the worst public health catastrophes in at least twenty years.

“I am being told they are on the verge of social collapse. It is an apocalypse out there, and really there is only one thing left to do. It is time for the good people of New York to abandon their homes, abandon their families, and abandon all the meaning they have constructed for themselves over a lifetime and move to the country and learn to farm.”

That’s a tall order that Mr. Worchestire is prescribing, but I am told it is not without precedent. Leading up to the 2016 Trump election, American citizens living in the Rust Belt, having faced similar signs of collapse and social decay due to their local industry outsourcing labor to third world countries, were chided by many enlightened liberal tastemakers that they should get the hell out of their shithole towns and learn to code. Human attachment is meaningless in a dynamic society, and having chosen to stay put, those Rust Beltians were met with the worst kind of elite disdain.

Now that COVID-19 is wreaking havoc on the pieties of manicured cosmopolitanism, one has to wonder when these enlightened coastal progressives will take their own advice, abandon their attachments, their loved ones, and everything that has ever mattered to them and get the hell out of town. In the process, maybe they can learn to do something, dare I say, “essential” in these apocalyptic times, like learning to live off the land, and once again become economically viable.

My guess is, their enlightened advice will only run one way.

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Earnest O'Connor

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