Former Dirty Jobs host Mike Rowe criticized Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s suggestion that any coronavirus lockdown restriction that saves just one life is worth it.
Rowe joined Fox News’s Dana Perino Tuesday and discussed getting people back to work and highlighted that safety is very important to him, but slammed the assertion that no order is too “drastic” if it saves one person.
“Well, not to pile up on the governor, but a couple of weeks ago, he said another thing that really snapped my neck,” Rowe said. “He said, ‘No measure, no matter how drastic or draconian, should be deemed unjustified if it saves a single life.’”
Cuomo said in March of closing nonessential businesses, “This is the most drastic action we can take.” The Democrat added that he wants to look back at the coronavirus and say, “I did everything we could do. … This is about saving lives. If everything we do saves just one life, I’ll be happy.”
“Safety obviously is very, very, very important, but the notion that nothing in the country is more important than staying safe, that’s not something commonsensical people embrace,” he continued. “That’s something you hear from people who are trying to sell you something, or politicians who are trying to get reelected. We have to get away from the cookie-cutter bromides and platitudes and start dealing with one zip code at a time.”
He also added in the segment, “When I was doing Dirty Jobs, things were flush, and very few people were paying very little attention to these anonymous, unsung workers who were making civilized life possible for the rest of us. Well, we’re in a different world right now. People got the memo. And so, as we attempt to define essentiality, if that’s a word, we need to think a little bit differently about the world we’re in.”
“Thirty-three, 34 million people are out of work right now and, and by definition, those people are out of work because, according to the governor, they are nonessential,” he said. “But if you look at the impact of removing those workers from our economy, you know, our macro-economy, you can see that they’re absolutely essential. So, language always matters. … This is one of those instances where the headlines have caught up to our vernacular, and if we don’t make some tweaks to our lexicon, we’re going to wind up sounding really, oh, what’s the word? Stupid.”
