The “stay at home” orders ALL allow, and must allow, for workers in crucial jobs to do them. They differ in different states, and nine states do not have them officially — but there is nothing wrong or surprising in all that. These nine states are not “heroic defenders of the last rights of Americans.” They are just less populated and affected.
The supermarket industry is one of many that must continue. In “locked down” cities there is now much more home delivery & curb pickup of internet orders, just as more folks work from home. We are wearing masks and adapting to what may be a new world, at least for awhile. This Pandemic could have been much worse. The next one may be.
Some American cultural traditions (often more comforting illusion than reality) concerning individual rights, and Americans peculiar hatred for any and all government action (outside of military intervention abroad), these may have to slowly change in the future, whether we like it or not.
Local and Federal shutdowns in this health crisis, whether we agree with them or not, are being taken by Trump’s right populist government, by Democratic and Republican governors alike. All this should make us less arrogant, seeing how we can be so easily reduced to such circumstances by a little virus. We should learn we were living in a kind of blessed ignorance. That our democracy and republican institutions and our “freedoms” are fragile. What happened in Weimar Germany can happen to us if we are not careful.
Societies like China and Vietnam that we call “communist” today, or others that are often simply denigrated as “sh*thole” countries, these are often just much poorer but still populous societies which have been victimized and held back by imperialism, or for other historical reasons have suffered repeated “plagues” of one form or another. There are all kinds of reasons societies fail and become dictatorships, or sometimes seem to require great collectivist dictatorships to rise up out of poverty and victimization. Capitalist dictatorships. Socialist dictatorships. Bureaucratic dictatorships. Personal dictatorships.
Let us not go crazy and destroy ourselves as a “free” society over this relatively minor epidemic. Our cohesiveness and social solidarity and economic and political systems are all being tested. If we fail, it won’t ultimately be anyone’s fault but our own.