Back in May before the latest
resurgence in COVID-19 cases, Elie Mystal in The Nation asserted that you “can’t mask stupid.” He was talking
about the “live free or die” types; of course they are “free” to do both, but
they shouldn’t be “free” to make other people sick or die. Mystal writes that “there’s
a hope that only the people who seem to be trying to get sick will get sick,
that it’s their choice to be irrational, and, if that’s the case, that we
should all be quiet while Darwin’s theory does its work...Unfortunately, that’s
not how our society works. That’s not how communicable diseases work…people
most likely to show up at your local grocery store or Costco without wearing a
mask, sneeze on your potential purchases, and then amble off in search of more ‘freedom’
while leaving sickness and death in their wake.”
Mystal also notes that if people
would just wear masks, they can do all the “fun” things they want to do, but “We
can’t have these nice things because we have too many selfish people spoiling
it for everybody else…A person walking around without a mask isn’t telegraphing
that they don’t care about their own life; they’re shouting that they don’t
care about yours. They’re willing to be the one who kills you, because they
don’t value anybody’s life but their own."
In states like Florida, where Gov. Ron
DeSantis, who many people liken as Donald Trump-lite, simply didn’t take the
pandemic seriously to begin with, even crowing about how he was “handling” the
virus far better than his counterpart in New York. But you eventually must pay
the piper for stupidity, and Florida is on pace to pass New York for the most
COVID-19 cases in the next month, or less. The
Orlando Sentinel editorialized that “DeSantis continues to rationalize,
pass the buck to local officials, personalize criticism, send mixed messages
and generally fails to convey the gravity of the situation.” The Sentinel states that DeSantis should
show leadership on the issue, or step aside and let the adults make the
decisions; Trump should do the same.
DeSantis isn’t alone among
Republican governors who continue to make deliberate efforts to endanger the
lives of the citizens of their own states just to be contrary. Georgia Gov. Brian
Kemp signed an executive order forbidding local governments from requiring
masks or sheltering in place, calling them “political” moves—when it is clear
that Kemp’s own moves are to save his and his party’s political skin, and not
that of their constituency. Other states, like Tennessee, deliberately
attempted to downplay the pandemic by not counting for months probable deaths by
the virus, thus its unusually low death tally per the number of positive test
results. Of course even in the state of Washington you have your Republican
enclaves that insist on the “right” to rule by their own laws, and even in
Seattle there are still the arrogant/impudent types who insist that they exist
in some kind of bubble when striding out in public.
Trump, of course, became bored
with playing commander-in-chief of the pandemic a long time ago, and has gone
on to do what he does “best,” which is to rile-up his base with various forms
of racial grievance, whether it is immigration, Confederate statues or
threatening to send federal forces into cities where his particularly brand of national
“healing” is deliberately designed to do the opposite. No, nothing Trump does
seldom makes any sense to 70 percent of the population. He still insists that a
payroll tax cut will “boost” the battered economy, when in fact the additional income on
a per-paycheck basis for the vast majority of working people would be barely
noticeable, and such a tax cut’s most obvious result will be that it hurts
funding of Social Security and Medicare, which “billionaires” like Trump have
no need for, and who don’t seem to think anyone else does either. But what else
do we expect? While millions of Americans have yet to receive their first
stimulus check first passed in April, the GAO is reporting that over 1 million dead people have received their checks.
Obviously the COVID-19 issue isn’t
going away as Trump predicted last March; a dozen or so cases that were
supposed to “disappear” in “days” is now approaching 4 million, with over
140,000 dead. It is simply a problem that Trump can’t just sign another one of
his executive orders to make “disappear.” Not that he hasn’t been trying; Trump
has been busy denouncing the medical establishment, banning hospitals from
sending new case information to the CDC, instead directing them to the
politicized Department of Health and Human Services. He is claiming that the
only reason there seems to be “problem” to some people is that there has been
more testing, and he intends to “fix” that “problem” by cutting stimulus
package funding for additional testing.
So-called Education Secretary
Betsy DeVos even got into the act, falsely claiming that the administration can
cut Congressionally-approved public education funding to schools that don’t mandate
“in-person” attendance. And you know you
can’t get much lower when your “experts” are people like game show host Chuck Woolery, who tweeted that
“everyone” is lying about “everything” just to make Trump look bad—which of
course Trump retweeted to his millions of uninformed fans. Meanwhile, the Washington Post latest count has Trump
telling over 20,000 lies and other various fabrications since he took
office.
Polls indicate that less than 28
percent of the population thinks Trump is showing leadership on the pandemic,
and that number more or less corresponds with the number of registered
Republican voters in this country, give or take a few doubters and
muscle-brained outliers. It isn’t like things couldn't have been handled differently;
while we can dismiss China’s numbers as domestic propaganda, Germany took an
immediate and active role in suppressing the virus within its borders, through
early testing and contact tracing, but particularly because its health care
system was prepared for high case numbers, with 40,000 ICU beds, which
doubtless has kept the fatality rate much lower than its neighbors.
But the U.S., despite having the
“best” health care in the world, was unprepared to handle the case
load, and while death rates haven't spiked yet during this current resurgence, virus fatalities tend to "lag" a month behind such sudden increases (at this moment Worldometers puts the number of serious/critical cases at 16,600). But just as disturbing is the lack of political leadership in most instances to deal with the
pandemic. Instead, we have a desk in the Oval Office which is as empty as the
brain of the man who occasionally sits behind it.
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