Eugene Robinson: I’ve Never Seen Anything Like This

EXCERPT:

ROBINSON: "Yeah. I’ve never seen anything like this. And this is going to go on for a while. You see the effects here in the Washington metropolitan area already. There’s no traffic anymore. I mean, there just isn’t because so many people are working at home. There’s no school, so there’s no school buses. You know, everything is different. Restaurants in most of the jurisdictions around here, there has been a directive, an order for restaurants to, at some point, either now or within a couple of days, go to take-out only. Where I live, there is a request for restaurants to do that. I know they have been starting to do it. It’s — again, I’ve never seen anything like it. I hope that what we saw yesterday, the President’s news conference, the measures that are being taken, I hope it was, you know — not to go all Meacham, but I hope it was Churchill’s the end of the beginning here in this country. Because the beginning was a phase in which a lot of people did not take this seriously, did not look at what had happened in China, what was happening in Italy and now the rest of Europe, and went about their daily lives in a state of denial. I hope no one can do that anymore. That we can’t be in denial and that we have to change our routines, which is a difficult thing to do. It’s hard to break a habit. But we need to break habits. We need to change routines. We need to live in a different way for the foreseeable future. And that could — you know, the President talked about, essentially, a lockdown for 15 days, but we all know it is going to be quite a bit longer than 15 days. I think I can say that safely."