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Celerity

(43,372 posts)
Mon May 4, 2020, 03:28 PM May 2020

How To Thrive During COVID-19 By Jared Kushner

"As my father was always fond of saying, whatever doesn’t kill you makes you richer."

As told to Rich Herschlag

https://thebanter.substack.com/p/how-to-thrive-during-covid-19-by

As I’ve so capably pointed out before, coronavirus was a hoax until it wasn’t. Now that it isn’t, I’ve answered my country’s call once again. Fresh off unadulterated triumphs bringing peace to the Middle East and ending the opioid crisis, I’ve been tapped to rid the nation of SARS-CoV-2, which I reserve the right to resume calling a hoax right up till the moment I get it. Crises are all about being adaptable. Over the past several weeks I’ve heard all sorts of complaints from Americans about everything from lack of food to lack of money to difficult living conditions, so I thought I’d take a few minutes to discuss that old American virtue called resourcefulness that seems to have been all but forgotten lately.

Take the recent Jewish holiday. We were in D.C. in the middle of lockdown and Ivanka wanted to spend this joyous occasion at her father’s golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. She had a point. The maror (horseradish) is better in Jersey and the fairways wider, so we really had a religious responsibility to head north. We could have whined ad nauseam like everyone else, but instead we sucked it up and flew a Cessna Citation to Somerset Airport. Looking down that day at the Northeast Corridor region and all its misery we considered the many sacrifices we were making on behalf of the country: The gas stations we were avoiding contaminating had we driven up 95. The truck stops and restrooms we have never used once in our lives but have heard are disgusting. The inevitable social distancing violations at a backed up E-ZPass lane.

These sacrifices, however, barely crossed our minds as we soared through cloud cover and bought a foreclosed low income housing development just below somewhere in downtown Wilmington. Whatever sorrows lay on terra firma, we chose the high road. Onward and upward. Escaping the often contentious and petty national capital with only the clothes on our back and an unlimited taxpayer funded expense account, we prayed for a smooth flight with uninterrupted 5G reception. With the fake media at our heels and the pandemic walls closing in fast, we fled in the nick of time much like the ancient Hebrews leaving Egypt. Looking down one last time at closed stores and empty mall parking lots, we knew that we had surely passed over. Once in Bedminster, our family faced the same sort of hardship most quarantined families have faced—being in the same room together for more than an hour.

But rather than fold or feud like so many other families, we reached deep into our souls and found practical solutions. While I watched Tiger King in the main screening room, Ivanka watched The Bachelorette in the south screening room, while the kids and their Ecuadorian nanny caught Peter Rabbit 2 in the children’s theater. And then, suddenly, a wave of gratitude swept over me. I realized that if not for this forced togetherness I might never have gotten to really know the east wing of the compound. By midweek the kids were getting bored, so Ivanka and I did what any good parents would do in this dire situation—fire the homeschool teacher and bring in a bunch of clowns and jugglers. Naturally, we kept the clowns six feet apart from the jugglers. We did have a little mishap with the sword swallower, but we took the kids aside afterward and explained to them in age appropriate language that the performer was a bad man who didn’t support the President, and sometimes bad things happen to bad people.

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