Americans aren’t necessarily going to starve, but we are probably going to see a lot less food on our store shelves in the next couple months as these problems in the supply chain get worked out. Tyson Foods just closed its huge meat processing plant near Pasco, Washington for coronavirus testing. That plant produces enough beef in one day to feed 4 million people and employs 1,400 workers. That company also closed its processing plants in Logansport, Ind., and Waterloo, Iowa. More than a dozen meatpacking plants are now closed across the country.

Minnesota farmers are talking about culling 200,000 pigs. It’s easy to say the farmers should just give their product away to the hungry — but who’s going to take the live pig and turn it into bacon? And who reimburses the hog farmer for his labor?…

Do you see how this makes the usual “Can you believe President Trump said this?” coverage — or its reverse, “You won’t believe that this cable news figure said about Trump!” — seem irrelevant and unimportant? I’d say we have bigger fish to fry, but as you saw above, we can’t even get that fish to the market. We are in the middle of the biggest news story of the century, a problem that touches every single life on the planet and is a threat to just about everyone in one form or another — physically, mentally, economically, socially. And some people can’t break out of their politics-as-usual thinking patterns.