There's a reason that Sweden keeps coming up over and over in the handful of posters here who are ready to throw caution to the wind. Big government, huge safety net-high taxing Sweden....is all of the sudden the darling in all conservative circles, from the internet, to radio to television.
Some people believe only what they want to believe. And that works, for awhile.
It worked for my in-laws, until the middle of March. They are ages 88 and 85. We love them very much, and vice versa. But we don't get our news from the same places they do. We don't vote the same way that they do. We don't talk about any of that, and this is how we've all managed to stay close and get along. They weren't changing our minds, and vice versa, and we all knew it. And that modus operandi worked just fine for all of us until right around the third week of February.
That's about the time my husband began first urging, then begging his father, the far more active of the two, to stop going to stores, etc. He explained what was happening and how we were already operating in our household. That we'd already stocked up and that they were both in a very high risk category, just by being in their late 80s. There were no fights, or anything like that. But my father in law ended those conversations abruptly in a "yeah, yeah, I don't want to hear it" kind of way.
Then...right around March 13th or 14th....everything changed in their tone. My mother in law was suddenly terrified and begging her husband to not go out. He was not completely buying it, but sounded scared. Then we realized that their news feed had done a 180...and all of the sudden, the virus was real. And about a week after that, two acquaintances, husband and wife, in their 55+ community were hospitalized. Two days later, his best friend was hospitalized. Now, those two acquaintances are dead. And his best friend is on a ventilator. My father in law was bowling his best friend 10 days before he went to the hospital. So....you know, that kind of changes your perspective on these kinds of things.
I haven't heard the code word "Sweden" just yet. I probably will eventually, and I'll bite through my tongue to keep the peace, as I drop off groceries because it's impossible to get a delivery for them from their own grocery store.
