stimpy wrote: Thu Dec 03, 2020 11:54 pmThat's not gonna change by the President asking people to do it..
To a degree, you're right. However, I'm going to offer two ingredients.
(1) 1/20/21 is going to look and feel very different than 12/3/20. I'm going to go out on a limb and say for some communities in the U.S., the next ~2 months are going to be potentially catastrophic.
(2) Having the leader of United States modeling behavior and asking everyone to participate is a big deal. Back when President Eisenhower had a heart attack in office, it helped raise awareness around the risks for all Americans. If he completely hid it or tried to downplay it as "no big deal" it would have changed the tone of preventative public health efforts focused on lifestyle diseases that had really just started out in the early 1950s.
I know it's been a few years, but the Office of the Presidency can actually be used for noble, respectable things that have real positive impacts.
I'm not naive enough to believe we're going to experience a sea-change in nationwide behaviors, but to start changing the message on this starting at Day 0 is laudable.