Charlie Munger, longtime business partner of Warren Buffett, was recently interviewed by Wall Street Journal’s Jason Zweig posted on April 17, 2020. In it he said

Almost everyone I talk to says the same thing: “These are crazy times” (or something similar).  It seems that many of us have a hard time wrapping our heads around this global pandemic.  We don’t know quite how we should feel about the constant stream of COVID-19 news.  It’s an eerie feeling.  We feel out of control, helpless.

ome of us will remember the date: October 14, 1962.  It’s been 57 years since the start of the Cuban Missile Crisis, an event which put the world on the brink of nuclear war.  It happened in the middle of the Cold War, when school children were routinely taught to hide under their desks in the event of an attack.  At that time, the U.S. discovered that the Soviet Union was deploying medium range ballistic missiles on Cuban soil.  This would become the biggest test of John F. Kennedy’s presidency.  Seeing this as an obvious threat to national security, Kennedy’s advisors prepared several options to consider, including an invasion of Cuba.  The President, however, feared that too aggressive a military response could trigger a military escalation from the Soviets, possibly starting a nuclear war.  Kennedy put the U.S. military on “maximum alert” and weighed all of his options, knowing that delaying his decision meant that more Cuban missiles would become operational.

You may be old enough to remember when television stations signed off the airwaves for the night. Some stations ended the day’s broadcasts by playing the National Anthem. After that, you saw nothing but a test pattern until the morning programming sign-on.