COVID-19 kills like a Crisis war, as I have shown in several posts ad nauseam.* In the last few days the analogy has almost been to military deaths of the American Civil War. (The death rate is not quite the same, but it is far worse than those per day in the two World Wars).
I see this plague ripping at the seams of American life, destroying much of the complacency that we have had. America used to be admirable in meeting natural disasters (floods, forest fires, earthquakes, hurricanes, and epidemics); we can no longer say that. Sure, Theodore Roosevelt could do little about the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire, but he left the work of rescue and recovery to the only federal institution then available (the Armed Forces) to do the job. Such is the precedent.
God Help Us should The Big One (earthquake) strike California, Utah, or the area around the Ohio-Mississippi confluence (New Madrid Quake, 1814). God Help Us should we have an unusually-bad hurricane season. I can expect President Trump to do more to milk a hurricane for political advantage than to serve the victims. Such is his character, and it is already killing people.
Consider this: Obama had no problem with dealing with Republican governors in preparation for hurricanes, let alone the aftermath. Human life is more important than partisan politics, dammit!
*OK, I may nauseate people with such a comparison of daily death tolls closer to those of the American Civil War as an analogue to the American Civil War than to anything else... but do you realize what really nauseates me? Trump incompetence in meeting this Crisis.
I see this plague ripping at the seams of American life, destroying much of the complacency that we have had. America used to be admirable in meeting natural disasters (floods, forest fires, earthquakes, hurricanes, and epidemics); we can no longer say that. Sure, Theodore Roosevelt could do little about the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire, but he left the work of rescue and recovery to the only federal institution then available (the Armed Forces) to do the job. Such is the precedent.
God Help Us should The Big One (earthquake) strike California, Utah, or the area around the Ohio-Mississippi confluence (New Madrid Quake, 1814). God Help Us should we have an unusually-bad hurricane season. I can expect President Trump to do more to milk a hurricane for political advantage than to serve the victims. Such is his character, and it is already killing people.
Consider this: Obama had no problem with dealing with Republican governors in preparation for hurricanes, let alone the aftermath. Human life is more important than partisan politics, dammit!
*OK, I may nauseate people with such a comparison of daily death tolls closer to those of the American Civil War as an analogue to the American Civil War than to anything else... but do you realize what really nauseates me? Trump incompetence in meeting this Crisis.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.