The first flourishes of greenery made their appearance high in the tulip poplar trees a few days ago, and the azaleas are bursting with red, lavender and pink in my backyard. Spring has sprung, y’all.

I should be sitting in the stands down at Fluor Field right now, watching the Greenville Drive take on the Greensboro Grasshoppers, scarfing down a hot dog, swigging on a cold drink and letting the sweet Carolina sunshine fill me with the goodness of springtime in the South.

But alas, there is no baseball. Instead, I’m sitting here in my living room, hunkered down, doing all I can to dodge the invisible enemy.

I’d rather write about something else, but it’s hard to think of anything else that really matters or seems appropriate to write about at a time like this.

It’s hard to know how to put this situation in perspective, because it seems like my perspective on it shifts several times a day. But it’s pretty obvious that things are going to get a lot worse before they get better. Twice as bad every two-and-a-half days, according to a University of South Carolina researcher who has developed a statistical model tracking the increase in the number of COVID-19 cases in the state.

His predictions, which have been on the mark so far, are that we’ll have more than 16,000 cases in the state by April 7. And that’s nowhere near the peak.

So, while it seemed to me a couple of days ago that with all this social distancing and the closing down of schools and restaurants and every other gathering of people that we might be able to put the brakes on the thing and escape without overrunning the hospitals. I’m not so sure about that now.

Before I go any further, I want to give a shout out in support of our health care professionals. They’re going to be on the front lines of this battle, and the risks they’re taking to help those of us who develop serious cases of COVID-19 are significant. It’s just too bad they may have to take greater risks than necessary because somebody didn’t make sure we had enough personal protective equipment for a time such as this.

It is pretty amazing, though, what our leaders in Washington can do — when our necks are in a noose and they have a gun to their head. Remarkably, they were able to come to agreement on the biggest whopping spending bill in the history of the Union — in a week’s time. They shut down the government for a month a while back over a measly $5 billion for a wall, and somehow were able to hash together a plan to save the country from the coronavirus for a cool $2 trillion in a matter of days.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad they did it, and I think it was the right thing to do, under the circumstances. Wall Street was certainly happy about it, and I’m thankful of that because my life savings were going to be gone with the wind pretty soon if things hadn’t turned around. By the time you read this, we may be on a downward slide again, but I’m hopeful that this cash infusion will keep the bottom from falling out.

I think now, however, we should go ahead and admit that government — the collective power of all of us — is what holds up our economic system, not the potentates of private enterprise. America’s mighty corporations would come crashing down without Big Government to rescue them. In fact, they didn’t become mighty corporations without Big Government’s help in the first place. A pandemic just strips away the thin curtain that hides the way we’ve been propping up the system.
So really, we are a lot closer to socialism than most conservatives would care to admit — and this bailout certainly nudges us even closer.

But, how in the blooming heck does Congress come up with $2 trillion overnight? You know how I judge the size of a billion dollars? Duke Power’s Bad Creek project, over in the mountains of Oconee County. It took several thousand men 10 years to tunnel through a mile of solid granite, install a bunch of pumps and turbines and hollow out a reservoir on top of a mountain to build that thing. That’s $1 billion. This is that times 2,000.

I’m certainly no economist and have only the vaguest idea about how high finance works. But from what I can ascertain (from reading Investopedia.com), the way this new money comes into being that is somebody at the Federal Reserve types some numbers into a computer, which magically turn into money. With this imaginary cash, the Fed buys up a lot of “securities.” And this has the effect of printing money, although it’s still only numbers on a computer.

I suspect somebody is getting rich in the process.

It would have been a lot smarter if we had just been prepared for the possibility that someday a pandemic was going to come our way and figured out how to be ready for it.