This is what we are bringing down upon our nation by gaslighting a pandemic.
This isn’t the flu. This isn’t an “old people’s disease.” This isn’t just an inconvenience for you. This isn’t a vast left-wing conspiracy to keep you from watching sports in person. This. Is. A. Pandemic.
Younger people as well as older people are dying horrible deaths. This poor man suffered for four months, over three of those months in the hospital. He lost function in both of his shot-through-with-holes lungs, and had a leg amputated before finally dying. Tell his 1-year-old son and 38-year-old widow that his was an “acceptable death.”
This is what our “What, Me Worry?” feigned ignorance in the face of a pandemic is doing.
And has done, and will do even more of to our nation. As we gear up insanely for in-person college in the rapidly impending fall, think about it: we’ll be hearing more of these stories (if the journalists keep reporting them, that is) about college students with their lives in front of them. We’ll be hearing the same stories about college faculty and staff and advisors to Greek organizations. We’ll be hearing these same stories about parents and grandparents when the college kids they’re so proud of come home at Thanksgiving. We’ll be hearing these same stories about some football players who could have lifted their families out of poverty in the NFL, maybe. We’ll be hearing these same stories about the immunocompromised siblings of the college students, who caught COVID-19 despite their best efforts to be protected. That is, if the First Amendment and the newspapers are still in operation.
Who knows, maybe we’ll hear the same stories about some high-ranking university administrators, say a college president or two? A chancellor or system president or two? Even, despite the best health care American wealth can provide, a university or corporation board member or two? Now does anyone care?
Historians will be utterly baffled at how the United States of America decimated its own empire because it couldn’t be bothered to combat an epidemic, despite having many of the best epidemiologists in the world and no shortage of ability to take obvious preventive actions that could have saved the lives of tens or hundreds of thousands — perhaps more. And ruined its own economy and world standing along the way.
What could have possessed Americans to turn the gun on themselves and pull the trigger?
Was it a giant hangover from rampant greed? Was it a culture of violence that was spread across the world with its wars and then came crashing back onto it like the deafening report of a monstrous gun? Was it a frustration with science and expertise that didn’t provide the Fountain of Youth and endless wealth as promised? Was it that America, the perpetually youthful country, was also perpetually adolescent or worse, never grew up, and it got mad at all its toys and decided to throw a temper tantrum and break everything it had for no good reason — waiting for Mom to come back and fix everything?
Was it because at the core of America was, in addition to its ideals, the death grip of hate, the systematic devaluing of human lives? And that the hate won out over the love, not only at routine police stops but across the entire culture, from schools and churches and movie theaters all the way, finally, to arenas and then hospitals and then graves, with services postponed until a never-ending pandemic finally ends?
Was it because, in the end, America taught Nazi Germany a thing or two about hate and death camps before it arose, and then America heard the amplified echo of that even as it vanquished that monster? And did that echo reverberate in the hollow place in America’s soul, where the hate had always lived and carved at the soul to make its own nook, and where the hate resonated even more, and amplified some more, until finally the hate overwhelmed the love like a feedback scream at a badly mic’d concert? And then all that remained was to one-up the Nazis at their own game, a game we helped show them, and to once and for all be known as America, the Land of the Free to Infect, the Home of Mass Graves?
Is this who we want to be?
Because it’s what we’re becoming. Last call, absolute last call, for a different fate. This can’t wait for November, and then January, especially if that election ends up being declared “fake” by the Confuser in Chief and goes to the courts. This insanity has to be turned around some right now. Or else:
This is the way America ends
This is the way the American Empire ends
This is the way the American Century ends
Not with a bang but with a whimper.
