For those of us who were kids in the 1970s and 80s, the catalyst of disaster was nuclear weapons. I'll never forget the day that I finally figured out that "duck and cover" wouldn't do anything but give us something to do right before we died. I was ten.
Then, of course, terrorism became the boogeyman. Not so much in small town or small city USA, which is where I've lived most of my life but in big cities. Washington. Los Angeles.
Manhattan.
The past decade or so the agent of dystopian fear has been more imaginary. The Walking Dead, aka the zombie apocalypse. Yeah, not too scary for me. I write horror for fun.
But now? Now we're looking at an antagonist that shouldn't have ever existed--a pandemic that so far cannot be halted with modern medicine. The fears of a pandemic have been an on-again, off-again nightmare for the past twenty years. Pretty much started for me when those f**king idiots were sending around anthrax in the wake of 9/11. Whether it was ebola or SARS, there was always something lurking around the corner that fizzled out before it impacted too many people in Europe and the US.
Until now.
I don't have words of wisdom for you that will explain all this. I don't have the medical training to discuss anything more than the most minor factoids that the CDC and common sense would dictate. That being said, however--
Politics is something I can write about.
Here's the situation in a nutshell. The past 12-15 years, the American government has been stagnated by party politics. No, I don't give a damn about either party. When you get right down to it, the Democrats are just as bad as the Republicans who are just as bad as the Democrats. I'd love to stack some more party names into that statement, but the fact of the matter is that we have no other viable parties. Corruption, back room deals, big industry and pharmaceuticals, special interest groups, PACs and SuperPACs, religious organizations, and lobbyists--that's who really controls the American government. Not the voters.
Not us.
Never has this been more apparent than now, during a global pandemic, when the US government couldn't get its shit together long enough to cross the aisle and come up with solutions to the crises now facing us. Yeah, I know. You've heard me snarling about the two-party system for years. But now it's no longer just a personal dislike. The COVID-19 virus has got me spooked and I'm not afraid to say it. And in the meantime, while you and me and billions of other people worldwide are staring down the barrel of the pandemic shotgun the United States government can't even agree on what's necessary to supply aid to its citizens who already are having to deal with supply shortages on food and other necessities, loss of pay for folks who live paycheck to paycheck or who are tipped employees, and a medical system that's already overwhelmed at the front end of this outbreak. With models of the outbreak leaning toward the peak infection rate in the US not coming until July, take a good look around you.
We're living in a REM song.
An article from The Atlantic over the weekend by Alexis Madrigal and Robinson Meyer traced the nightmarish incompetence of the federal government to give the medical and research sectors the ability to assertively track, diagnose, and treat the coronavirus. Their article also gave viral expert and research scientist Trevor Bedford a platform to share some truly alarming facts.
So if the current models are correct and Americans won't see the virus peak until July, we're looking at four and a half months of dealing with the ramifications of the coronavirus. Think about it: life without schools, churches, and for most Americans their jobs and/or income. Sheltering at home turns into an elongated vigil, and when you do have to run out to the store or the bank then you face three weeks when every little cough or sneeze feels significant. And if you catch coronavirus, you face quarantine for weeks by a medical community that's woefully understaffed and undersupplied.
There is no one person to blame. The blame can be spread around evenly between Democrats and Republicans, the House of Representatives and the Senate, the CDC and state and local health monitoring facilities. The CDC didn't confirm community transmission of COVID-19 until February 26 even though there were already at least sixty known cases in the US.
And the White House. Oh yes, plenty of blame to be slathered onto the Oval Office where the President of the United States first mocked the virus and delayed federal response to the eruption of the medical and financial impacts of COVID-19 through January, February, and over half of March before Trump assembled his too-little too-late task force. And no, that's not partisan. That's a fact. Just a few examples:
At a February 10 campaign rally in Manchester, New Hampshire: "And by the way, the virus, they're working hard. Looks like by April, you know, in theory, when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away."
In a February 26 briefing at the White House: The infection seems to have gone down over the last two days. As opposed to getting larger, it’s actually gotten smaller. In one instance where we think we can be — it’s somewhat reliable, it seems to have gotten quite a bit smaller.
In a February 27 meeting with African-American leaders: "It’s going to disappear. One day — it’s like a miracle — it will disappear. And from our shores, we — you know, it could get worse before it gets better. It could maybe go away. We’ll see what happens. Nobody really knows."
And all sorts of other examples, which you can find for yourself in this cross-referenced article on the Mercury News.
But, it's not just the Trump administration who are guilty of screwing the biggest and most infectious pooch the US has faced since the 1917-18's Spanish flu epidemic.Both sides of the aisle have been tinkering with federal legislation to alleviate the disaster-in-the-making coronavirus, ticky-tacking so that pet projects can also benefit from emergency legislation. And just last night, the Democrats killed an Emergency Economic Relief legislation in the Senate--$1.8 trillion dollars of legislation desperately needed to help Americans financially and shore up the US stock market.
You know--maybe there were valid reasons for voting that aid package down. Maybe there were inherent flaws or oblique advantages for the big-pharmaceutical corporations that support Trump and other Republicans. But in the end, that doesn't matter to most Americans. What does matter right now is feeding their kids or finding things like meat, milk, fresh vegetables, and paper products in the grocery store. And as we stare into the face of what's looking dangerously more like another depression instead of a recession, Americans don't give a damn about someone getting a bridge package in Timbuktu approved. All they care about is getting the help they need, and it's glaringly obvious that nothing is more important to the politicians in Washington than scoring off their opponents no matter what they toss aside in the process.
So yes, Americans. Your government has failed you yet again, only this time we're not talking about some stupid impeachment trial. We're talking about decisions being made, legislation being killed, delusions being reported as fact. We're talking about a legislature that doesn't seem to care how many people are sick or dying because all they really care about is winning their reelection campaigns. We're talking about a President of the United States who's now glorifying himself as the hero of the pandemic by keeping COVID-19 when just in the past month he's mocked the virus, downplayed its importance, stalled a federal response that might have saved lives, and turned the pandemic into a polarizing morass of conflicting information so heinous that his own team has to step forward and correct or refute what Trump said just moments before.
We're talking about the real pandemic in this country: a two-party political system that should be held responsible for the spread of the virus in America and every single death that occurs because the patient was not diagnosed early enough or the hospitals and physicians don't have the equipment they need to help.
The real pandemic here? The escalating inadequacy of the federal government to effect positive change on behalf of its citizens. That's the real diagnosis of this disaster. The federal government is nothing more than a roiling, diseased collection of Typhoid Marys infecting the American way of life. And even when there is a vaccine for coronavirus (and we're realistically looking at 1-2 years before there's any sort of preventative or cure for COVID-19) the self-injected infection of the federal government will still remain and the citizens of this country are the physicians who are baffled about how to halt the spread of the disease.
Physician, heal thyself. Eliminate the real disease that's centralized in DC. Kick them ALL out and start over because this catastrophe could have been avoided with just one politician willing to take a stand on behalf of all the rest of us. We were failed by the people we elected to represent our basic existence in this nation.
So yes, physician, heal thyself and remember that there is a cure for the real pandemic here. It's called "Election Day".
Until now.
I don't have words of wisdom for you that will explain all this. I don't have the medical training to discuss anything more than the most minor factoids that the CDC and common sense would dictate. That being said, however--
Politics is something I can write about.
Here's the situation in a nutshell. The past 12-15 years, the American government has been stagnated by party politics. No, I don't give a damn about either party. When you get right down to it, the Democrats are just as bad as the Republicans who are just as bad as the Democrats. I'd love to stack some more party names into that statement, but the fact of the matter is that we have no other viable parties. Corruption, back room deals, big industry and pharmaceuticals, special interest groups, PACs and SuperPACs, religious organizations, and lobbyists--that's who really controls the American government. Not the voters.
Not us.
Never has this been more apparent than now, during a global pandemic, when the US government couldn't get its shit together long enough to cross the aisle and come up with solutions to the crises now facing us. Yeah, I know. You've heard me snarling about the two-party system for years. But now it's no longer just a personal dislike. The COVID-19 virus has got me spooked and I'm not afraid to say it. And in the meantime, while you and me and billions of other people worldwide are staring down the barrel of the pandemic shotgun the United States government can't even agree on what's necessary to supply aid to its citizens who already are having to deal with supply shortages on food and other necessities, loss of pay for folks who live paycheck to paycheck or who are tipped employees, and a medical system that's already overwhelmed at the front end of this outbreak. With models of the outbreak leaning toward the peak infection rate in the US not coming until July, take a good look around you.
We're living in a REM song.
An article from The Atlantic over the weekend by Alexis Madrigal and Robinson Meyer traced the nightmarish incompetence of the federal government to give the medical and research sectors the ability to assertively track, diagnose, and treat the coronavirus. Their article also gave viral expert and research scientist Trevor Bedford a platform to share some truly alarming facts.
If there is one thing about the novel coronavirus that you must understand, it’s that it is a firecracker with a long fuse. Here is what the explosion looks like: Every six days, the number of people infected by the disease doubles, according to estimates from Bedford and other epidemiologists. At the start of February, Bedford now believes, the United States had something like 430 infections; if American interventions have done nothing to slow the disease’s spread, then his simple calculations show that more than 120,000 people could be infected by this weekend. Because of the great uncertainty, it’s probably most appropriate to give Bedford’s range: About 60,000 to 245,000 people are now infected with COVID-19 in the United States.
So if the current models are correct and Americans won't see the virus peak until July, we're looking at four and a half months of dealing with the ramifications of the coronavirus. Think about it: life without schools, churches, and for most Americans their jobs and/or income. Sheltering at home turns into an elongated vigil, and when you do have to run out to the store or the bank then you face three weeks when every little cough or sneeze feels significant. And if you catch coronavirus, you face quarantine for weeks by a medical community that's woefully understaffed and undersupplied.
There is no one person to blame. The blame can be spread around evenly between Democrats and Republicans, the House of Representatives and the Senate, the CDC and state and local health monitoring facilities. The CDC didn't confirm community transmission of COVID-19 until February 26 even though there were already at least sixty known cases in the US.
And the White House. Oh yes, plenty of blame to be slathered onto the Oval Office where the President of the United States first mocked the virus and delayed federal response to the eruption of the medical and financial impacts of COVID-19 through January, February, and over half of March before Trump assembled his too-little too-late task force. And no, that's not partisan. That's a fact. Just a few examples:
At a February 10 campaign rally in Manchester, New Hampshire: "And by the way, the virus, they're working hard. Looks like by April, you know, in theory, when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away."
In a February 26 briefing at the White House: The infection seems to have gone down over the last two days. As opposed to getting larger, it’s actually gotten smaller. In one instance where we think we can be — it’s somewhat reliable, it seems to have gotten quite a bit smaller.
In a February 27 meeting with African-American leaders: "It’s going to disappear. One day — it’s like a miracle — it will disappear. And from our shores, we — you know, it could get worse before it gets better. It could maybe go away. We’ll see what happens. Nobody really knows."
And all sorts of other examples, which you can find for yourself in this cross-referenced article on the Mercury News.
But, it's not just the Trump administration who are guilty of screwing the biggest and most infectious pooch the US has faced since the 1917-18's Spanish flu epidemic.Both sides of the aisle have been tinkering with federal legislation to alleviate the disaster-in-the-making coronavirus, ticky-tacking so that pet projects can also benefit from emergency legislation. And just last night, the Democrats killed an Emergency Economic Relief legislation in the Senate--$1.8 trillion dollars of legislation desperately needed to help Americans financially and shore up the US stock market.
You know--maybe there were valid reasons for voting that aid package down. Maybe there were inherent flaws or oblique advantages for the big-pharmaceutical corporations that support Trump and other Republicans. But in the end, that doesn't matter to most Americans. What does matter right now is feeding their kids or finding things like meat, milk, fresh vegetables, and paper products in the grocery store. And as we stare into the face of what's looking dangerously more like another depression instead of a recession, Americans don't give a damn about someone getting a bridge package in Timbuktu approved. All they care about is getting the help they need, and it's glaringly obvious that nothing is more important to the politicians in Washington than scoring off their opponents no matter what they toss aside in the process.
So yes, Americans. Your government has failed you yet again, only this time we're not talking about some stupid impeachment trial. We're talking about decisions being made, legislation being killed, delusions being reported as fact. We're talking about a legislature that doesn't seem to care how many people are sick or dying because all they really care about is winning their reelection campaigns. We're talking about a President of the United States who's now glorifying himself as the hero of the pandemic by keeping COVID-19 when just in the past month he's mocked the virus, downplayed its importance, stalled a federal response that might have saved lives, and turned the pandemic into a polarizing morass of conflicting information so heinous that his own team has to step forward and correct or refute what Trump said just moments before.
We're talking about the real pandemic in this country: a two-party political system that should be held responsible for the spread of the virus in America and every single death that occurs because the patient was not diagnosed early enough or the hospitals and physicians don't have the equipment they need to help.
The real pandemic here? The escalating inadequacy of the federal government to effect positive change on behalf of its citizens. That's the real diagnosis of this disaster. The federal government is nothing more than a roiling, diseased collection of Typhoid Marys infecting the American way of life. And even when there is a vaccine for coronavirus (and we're realistically looking at 1-2 years before there's any sort of preventative or cure for COVID-19) the self-injected infection of the federal government will still remain and the citizens of this country are the physicians who are baffled about how to halt the spread of the disease.
Physician, heal thyself. Eliminate the real disease that's centralized in DC. Kick them ALL out and start over because this catastrophe could have been avoided with just one politician willing to take a stand on behalf of all the rest of us. We were failed by the people we elected to represent our basic existence in this nation.
So yes, physician, heal thyself and remember that there is a cure for the real pandemic here. It's called "Election Day".
