Roll Over, Adam Smith — You Wrote "The Wealth Of Nations," But Tom Tomorrow Envisions The Potential Of "The HEALTH Of Nations"

In the e-mail that delivered today's TMW 'toon, Tom/Dan also wrote:

Welp.

I hope you are all practicing safe distancing and social isolation, and washing your hands frequently. As a freelancer, of course, I’ve been training for this moment my entire life.

Ah, I joke, but even for me it’s going to be a challenge. The way I manage working alone so much of the time is by going out a few times a week to see friends, and that’s off the table for awhile. I’m also unlikely to see my son for awhile, if the city goes into full lockdown. And I’ve been in a relationship for several months which unfortunately necessitates getting on airplanes, so it looks like that’s going to be on hold for the indeterminate future as well.

Ugh.

As I write this, a lot of New Yorkers seem not to have caught up to the current reality. I went out this morning for groceries and the local bistros were full of brunchers. And I’m seeing a lot of pictures on Twitter of people crowding into bars.

Please remember, it doesn’t matter how healthy you, personally, are. I was texting with my 16 year old, trying to be a reassuring father and explaining that young people recover pretty quickly from the coronavirus, and his response was, “sure but at the same time, I’m not a soulless republican who only cares about my own well being. My concerns much more lie with those at high risk.” (a) I’m delighted that my ex and I seem to have raised a genuinely decent human being, and (b) if my teenager understands this, so should you.

Stay safe, wash your hands, don’t touch your face. Unless your face is a hand? (I confess that half the reason the Hand returns to the strip this week, in his doctor costume, is that I really, really wanted to get that dumb final panel joke in there.)

Until next week,

Dan/Tom

The first word in today's message from the 'toonist ("Welp") is the perfect expression for living with a worsening pandemic. There are countries that have experienced terrible losses from the coronavirus pandemic and those countries have survived. The prognosis for the United States is unclear because our national public health system has been relentlessly been under budgetary attack from another enemy — the current White House. If this is a (fair & balanced) unpromising prognosis, so be it.

[x TMW]
Pandemic Advice From The Invisible Hand Of The Free Market
By Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins)

[Dan Perkins is an editorial cartoonist better known by the pen name "Tom Tomorrow." His weekly comic strip, "This Modern World," which comments on current events from a strong liberal perspective, appears regularly in approximately 150 papers across the US, as well as on Daily Kos. The strip debuted in 1990 in the SF Weekly. Perkins received the Robert F. Kennedy Award for Excellence in Journalism in both 1998 and 2002. When he is not working on projects related to his comic strip, Perkins writes a daily political blog, also entitled "This Modern World," which he began in December 2001. More recently, Dan Perkins, pen name Tom Tomorrow, was named the winner of the 2013 Herblock Prize for editorial cartooning. Even more recently, Dan Perkins was a runner-up for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning.]

Copyright © 2020 This Modern World/Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins)

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