(Warington, MD) - Like many Americans, Joseph Franklin paid little attention to the coronavirus when it started making headlines. The fifty-one year-old management training administrator believed that the virus would succeed in frightening liberals and the same alarmists "who worry about global warming." As little as a week ago, Franklin posted several infographics comparing the mortality rate of the annual flu virus to that of COVID-19.
"This thing is like a cold and has been around for hundreds of years," he wrote on his Facebook account, "Don't listen to the fear mongers. They're just trying to distract us from how good a job the President is doing. No success in the impeachment trail [sic]? Got to have something to scare people away from the truth. Don't buy the hype, people."
This continued with Franklin's demand that his family not break tradition in their going to Applebee's last Friday for a family dinner. Nonplussed by the emptiness of the restaurant, he doubled down on his belief that there was nothing to worry about.
"You got to be kidding me," he told the waitress, Annette Jackson, as he gestured around at the empty booths. "What is the big hubbub about? Seriously? Everyone's going to be looking awful silly when they realize how this is just a big to do about nothing."
"He and his family come here pretty often," she later said, "And even though he's a lousy tipper and tells his wife what to order, I can't say anything to him about this stuff because, well, you just know this is the kind of guy who is going to go light on an already light tip because I didn't just immediately agree with him. So, yeah, I nodded and said something like, 'oh yeah, it's just crazy, you know?' Then, he got all smiley and pointed at me, and said, 'see? She gets it,' like that was some big accomplishment. I can't say I'm glad that they're basically laying everyone off at this point, or our hours are cut so low that I'm going to have trouble making rent, but if there's anything good that came out of this, it's that I don't have to deal with guys like him for a while. Ugh. What an asshole."
As Franklin's own state of Maryland nears a thousand confirmed cases and the state government has shuttered all non-essential businesses, he faces a dire choice: can he, in full view of a death toll of nearly 30,000 worldwide, and a skyrocketing rate of infection in the United States, admit to possibly having been wrong?
"I mean," Franklin started to speak and then paused for several moments to contemplate his next words, "It's like," he paused again, searching for something to say that would acknowledge new information without making him lose any face at all in front of his family and the community at large. "There's always something. And, the liberal news media is always honking its horn about this or that - you can't actually tell what's a real threat and what isn't. I still say that this isn't that big a deal. Trump says we'll be back to normal by Easter, and, I mean, that's what God would want, isn't it? Makes sense to me. If anything really bad comes of it, I'd lay the blame at the feet of the liberal news media. How are we supposed to know when something is actually scary, if they're just scared of everything all the time?"
Content with his answer of not admitting to much of anything, Franklin spent the rest of the afternoon checking to make sure that all of his firearms were in working condition just in case "any looters show up at the house in the midst of all this craziness."
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