Lessons learned today may help keep our country safe in the future

Lessons learned today may help keep our country safe in the future.

It is not as difficult to shut down the U.S. society and economy as one may have thought, after all.

As we consider how to move forward after COVID-19 someday, it’s important to take stock of what we’ve learned as a country from our stay-at-home and social distancing experiences. 

Something like coronavirus not only could happen again, it probably will. What will we do different? I think we’ve learned that it is not wise to depend on foreign countries for our medicines and medical supplies. The U.S. stopped making penicillin years ago, for example, it was reported. 

Another lesson learned, I think, is that while globalism in theory is good for your soul (let’s all be one), we have to take care of our country first. Call it nationalism, if you want. We can’t depend on other countries’ resources to be there when we need them.

United States leaders and citizens must take care of the United States first. COVID-19 has reawakened legitimate concerns about the possibility of germ warfare. Look what COVID-19 has done to our society and economy, and not a shot was fired.

America’s enemy of the future may very well employ germ warfare to try and take us to our knees. If we’re going to ensure that our children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren can grow up and live with the same abundance of security like we ourselves did, then we must embrace another wave of nationalism like we had after 9/11. 

It should be unlawful for our national leaders - or their families or relatives - to own stock, serve on boards, or otherwise benefit from businesses owned by foreign countries that do business with our own country - even after the national leaders leave office. That is a blatant conflict of interest that has delivered us to our current crisis. We hear too many stories about our national leaders and their families benefiting financially in return for “favored foreign country status’’ that could compromise our country’s security.