Donald Trump pressured the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to allow plasma treatment for COVID-19. This may be a benefit. It will probably not be a disaster. It is not the miracle or “historic breakthrough” Trump is claiming. At best, it helps people who have COVID-19 recover faster.
Trump is desperate for a miracle that will save his presidency. He didn’t get the one that would have saved it because he was wrong when he said what is now a pandemic would miraculously go away. Other miracle drugs along the way have also not been successful.
This is classic magical thinking — it will happen because I want it to happen. According to Piaget’s stages of development, magical thinking occurs during the preoperational stage which ranges from ages 2-7. And that’s about where Donald Trump is in his development as a human being.
Adults would have used their intellect or emotional connections with others to realize something needed to be done. They would work on the problem. Many world leaders succeeded in doing this, but not all. Those who succeeded put lock-downs in place, required social distancing and masks, and started contact tracing. Those countries have much lower rates of infection, so a miracle is not required. Careful scientific research is enough.
Here in the US Trump needs a miracle to stay in power. Plasma treatment is not that miracle. It won’t reduce the number of new cases a day, and it won’t convince anyone new to act in a socially responsible way. In other news today, China’s life is starting to look normal again. New Zealand and several other countries have been there for a while. The adults in those countries, whether we agree with their politics or not, found ways to lead their countries through the pandemic. Perhaps we can elect some adults to lead us through ours.
Adults solve problems during a crisis. Little children hope for a miracle.
Last Wednesday a customer bought a stack of books from us. Right before he left, he asked me, “what parts of your business are affected by Amazon?” I blurted out, “every part.” I had never articulated this before, but it’s true. I know I’m not alone in saying this, and not just among bookstores, either. Your business has an unfair impact on every retail small business in America. I’m writing you to try to illustrate just how many people your business affects in a negative way.
Let’s start with books, because that’s where we overlap and books are my bread and butter. Correct me if I’m wrong, but it certainly seems like the book part of your business is modeled like this: sell books at a loss to hook people into Prime subscriptions, Kindles, Alexas, and other higher-margin products. While this strategy has worked really well for you, it’s totally disrupted everything about the book business, making a low-margins business even tighter. Most dismayingly to us, your book business has devalued the book itself. People expect hardcovers to be 15 bucks and paperbacks to be under 10. Those margins are a nightmare for our bottom line, of course, but they also cheapen the idea of the capital-B Book. There’s already enough happening to cheapen the idea of truth, research, and careful storytelling. We’re dismayed to see the world’s biggest book retailer reflecting that frightening cultural shift by de-valuing books.
This isn’t just about business competition to us. We wish it was! We like business competition, we think it’s healthy. But the way you’ve set things up makes it impossible to compete with you. Often the tech and e-commerce world brags about “disrupting” old ways of doing things with new, sleeker, more efficient tricks. But we refuse to be a quaint old way of doing things, and we are not ripe for disruption. We’re not relics; we’re community engines. We create free programming. We donate gift certificates to charity silent auctions. We partner with libraries and arts organizations. That stuff might seem small to someone aiming to colonize outer space, but to us and our community it’s huge. Our booksellers are farmers, authors, activists, artists, board members, city council representatives. For so many places, the loss of an indie bookstore would mean the loss of a community force. If your retail experiment disrupts us into extinction you’re not threatening quaint old ways of doing things. You’re threatening communities.
Or maybe I could request a leveling of the playing field. Small business owners are led to believe that if their idea is good enough, they can grow their business and create more jobs. Yet your company is so big, so disruptive, so dominant, that it’s severely skewed the ability for us to do that. I think a big part of leveling the playing field would mean fair pricing on your part. For our part, we try to level things by being really good at what we do, and being really loud. So we use our platform to try to teach people what’s at stake as your company increases its influence and market share. I think it’s starting to work. I get the feeling that we’re seeing chips in Amazon’s armor. Whenever we share stuff like this, it seems to resonate with our audience. Maybe someday you’ll hear what we have to say. Maybe we can talk about it over pie and coffee at Ladybird Diner across the street, my treat. I’d love to show you around a vibrant community anchored by small businesses, here in Kansas, here on earth. Maybe it’ll help you realize that some things don’t need to be disrupted.
Sincerely, Danny Caine, Owner Raven Book Store Lawrence, Kan.
Wednesday, May 8, 2003. Fifty-seven e-mail messages, 34 pieces of commercial spam.
The easiest thing: delete, delete, delete… But I don’t like porn. I don’t like ads for low mortgage rates. I don’t like Viagra ads, or offers of human growth hormone, or other ways to grow three inches, or offers of riches from Togo.
I know others who agree with me and want to end the spam. Among them are large Internet Service Providers (ISPs, including AOL, Earthlink, and Microsoft), state and federal governments, and, most of all, people like you and me who are deluged daily with worthless e-mail. Continue reading An Anti-Spam Law
