This is going to be an uncomfortable post but it must be said. Sometimes, love looks like telling people things they don’t want to hear.

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Let me start by saying trust me when I tell you I’m sympathetic. We’re currently effectively under house arrest in Italy. The only reason we’re in Italy right now was to play a series of shows, which got canceled. Now we’re locked down in Italy, and cannot return to the USA where we were booked to record a new album, which has now been postponed indefinitely. So yeah, I get it. I really do.

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That said, my feed remains full of many musicians and authors who are bound and determined to go through with their concerts, book signings, and other social / promotional events regardless of the consequences.

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It’s time to start publicly shaming these events. The USA has been lulled into a false sense of security due in no small part by a failure of our public officials and the media outlets which pander to them by repeating their lies and the minimizations. NOTHING is under control except the facts. The actual numbers of infected are MUCH higher than what is being reported. America is sailing into a heathcare tsunami.

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The ONLY way to control this pandemic is SOCIAL DISTANCING. If you are responsible for encouraging social gatherings, then you share responsibility for any negative outcomes. Consider: in Italy, as I write this, you can get charged with murder for holding an event that leads to someone contracting a fatal case of this disease.

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Folks, Italy isn’t an “outlier.” It’s a FRONTRUNNER.

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Public gatherings of any kind must be stopped now, before its too late to save the nation’s hospitals. If the federal government, the state, the city, or the club owners won’t stop these events, then the artists must do so.

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Sincerely, from lockdown in Italy.

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#StayTheFuckHome #flattenthecurve