Grandparents should die willingly because our COVID-19 response has been pathetic? Hell. No.

Dan Patrick is 69 years old. He's the lieutenant governor of Texas, and the chairman of Donald Trump's re-election campaign in that state.
Monday night, he said something that took my breath away. It was on Tucker Carlson's show on Fox News Channel.
I wasn't watching. I read about it Tuesday morning.
"I'm not living in fear of COVID-19," Patrick said.
"What I'm living in fear of is what's happening to this country. And you know, Tucker, no one reached out to me and said, 'As a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival, in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren?'
"And if that's the exchange, I'm all in."
In other words, we need to call a halt to this stay-home lifestyle, and live our lives productively and openly in the presence of COVID-19 to power our economy back to life. And if Grandpa and Grandma are infected and expire, well ... at least the grandkids can wear something new and nice to the funerals.
I cannot believe I'm writing about this.
I cannot believe this was suggested in public.
I cannot believe that anyone would take it seriously.
But here we are. Days we never thought we'd see.

I have three grandsons (16, 9, 7 years old) and I love them more than anything.
And if there were NO OTHER WAY to ensure their future is more economically stable than it is in this moment, I MIGHT consider ending my carefree, uber-sequestered life of the past 12 days.
I MIGHT fly in commercial airliners or have sumptuous dinners with my well-heeled friends.
I MIGHT attend major sporting events, rubbing elbows and swilling overpriced beers with other fans.
I MIGHT write my pithy tomes in trendy coffeehouses, knowing that I could be infected at any second, putting my life — and the lives of others — in jeopardy.
You know, go out in a blaze of glory for the good of hedge funds.
But.
There is another way, and fewer people — grandparents and non-grandparents — would die. This other way requires the kind of national effort and self-sacrifice that we like to talk about with misty eyes when we talk about the Greatest Generation.
Kind of.
This sacrifice requires several weeks/months of working from home, or personal inactivity and TV-watching and web-surfing and — yes, I know — plenty of economic peril.
But if done correctly, with all or the overwhelming majority of citizens onboard, it lasts a relatively short time. Not the years-long effort and sacrifice of WWI, WWII or the Great Depression.
The goal: Keep a very, very low profile as long as we can, keep undue stress off our health care system, keep deaths as low as possible. Live to breathe another day.

This thinking by the Texas lieutenant governor — why are we listening to him? — is overly dystopian and assumes there's no economic light at the end of ANY tunnel that could save hundreds, thousands or millions of lives.
Your life.
It also speaks to our instant-gratification society, in which we demand an impossibly immediate cure for a disease we'd never heard of six months ago.
We hate being inconvenienced.
It also suggests that many grandparents — people who remember, or maybe lived through, the great and remarkable sacrifices mentioned above — would go along with this.

I won't.
I'm not willing to put me (63 years old), my wife (59), my brother (72), my sister (74) or my mom (98) on the line because a subsection of America can't be vaccinated fast enough and also can't be depended on to make the necessary sacrifices.
Oh, one last thing to consider.
It's very possible that we would have been further along in this matter — lives saved, health care systems not as strained, outlook less dire — if COVID-19 had been taken seriously from the beginning by the highest levels of our government.
But it wasn't. Both our health care system and economic system are struggling to breathe.
And now a government official suggests that older people should be — or would be, maybe — willing to die for that malfeasance?
Hell. No.