Am I crazy for no longer supporting @GovInslee’s lockdown of Washington State?

I understand that locking down was necessary to stop the spread of the virus and keep our hospitals safe. And I supported that.

I supported Inslee’s extension of the lockdown as well. We needed to give our cases time to go away, and for the virus to become less prevalent in our community.

And, even right now, I think we still need lockdown measures on some scale. It would be incredibly reckless to re-open fully and totally go back to normal while this virus is, while diminished, present in our community.

I can’t support the current, full-scale lockdown measures in place right now, though. Many small businesses that shut their doors to lockdown will never reopen again. Many workers that have been furloughed will see that their jobs won’t return due to budget cuts from the virus.

Think critically about this for a second. The culture of our communities is made up of small businesses. If we keep this lockdown in place and continue to starve out small businesses, not only will we lose the culture of our city, but we’ll sacrifice it to the companies that...

are most equipped to survive this pandemic. Those are your big corporations—your Amazon, your Wal-Mart, your Target, your Microsoft. Capitalism isn’t kind, and if a big business sees the opportunity to capitalize on a pandemic, they’re going to do it. Small businesses won’t be

replaced by new small businesses, because people who would create small businesses are hurting just like the rest of us are. The ones who aren’t hurting, though, are those big corporations.

I’m not calling for a full-scale re-opening, because that would be reckless and

terrible for human life. But there needs to be some sort of relaxation of measures so that we don’t completely decimate our community’s economy and culture for decades. Or, at the very least, some sort of state-funded relief to small businesses in our state.

Capitalism sucks.