PANDEMIC: COVID-19
America is caught naked in what David Brooks of the New York Times calls a ‘national humiliation’. We cannot defeat Covid-19 even though most of the World is doing just that.
The European Union has more than 450 million people; we have over 300 million. They are clearly defeating the virus and we are presently drowning in new cases. Arizona with 7 million people has more new cases of Covid than all of Europe. We set a record for new cases day after day.
We cannot seem to find the discipline to care about what we are doing to ourselves and to others even when 135,000 have died and millions have been sick and threatened with a lifetime of ill health because they had the virus.
So many young people are treating this disease so lightly that reports of people with Covid going to parties reminds us that the gay community, convinced that AIDS was inevitable, acted similarly for years, having sex when infected despite the warnings and pleadings of authorities and the society itself.
And so nothing about today, what we are doing, how we are acting as a nation with leaders in denial is new. What has happened to America’s pride and spirit? Why are individuals acting with a singular and overwhelming self-interest rather than with a genuine sense of community and responsibility.?
We have made a mockery of “We are all in this together.”
Would it had made a difference if he who would be King had called the nation to one major effort? If he had ignored the falling Stock Market numbers and had risen to use the New York, New Jersey, Connecticut model to shut the entire nation down to first defeat the disease and then return to work… rather than to try to ignore and downplay it because he feared for his reelection?
Would America have risen to the occasion and won the war instead of following the will of the Pretender and continue to lose it?
Incredibly he had called out the self-interest that has now become America’s government when he damned all politicians: ”They don’t care about you, they only care about being elected”.
This damaged personality had it exactly right…and has fallen deep into the pit of self- interest himself.
When holding public office became a full-time job and a career, America lost its representative democracy.
Human nature is human nature no matter where you look. When your job supports you and a family and becomes a career, that job becomes the pathway to your life. You will do anything to keep it.
What politicians need to hold their jobs is money to fuel campaign after campaign in primary and general elections. And when the hands offering large amounts of money come with the implied understanding that nothing is free, the will of the people becomes secondary and your job no longer depends on them.
What is lost in the exchange is all sense of community and personal responsibility.
And that loss permeates the society as surely as any pandemic.
When self- interest commands every movement, every action becomes blind to reality. Nothing else matters. Even the fatal results of a pandemic.
This symptom of our age made the charge of self-interest and he is acting it out as if his life depended on it.
ENDEMIC: RACISM
What America has never achieved is equality.
Perhaps that one of all our national and constitutional promises was an impossibility.
Freedom. Justice, Opportunity. Yes much has been done in our history to try. The very growth and power of our way of life has attracted immigrants from the World over to seek a life that would never exist for them. Here in a country with such promises as those there is a chance at life…at least a chance.
But slavery existed here before there was an America. And those Africans who were kidnapped from their World, shackled and enslaved and shipped to the 13 Colonies to be purchased as property did not know any sense of freedom or justice for more than 200 years.
The new nation’s promises of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness…of all men being created equal… were not made to them. Property has little personhood.
What Black Lives Matter is doing is reminding us that since the changes in law produced by the work of Martin Luther King, sixty years have passed and certain fundamental truths remain untouched despite a Civil Rights and a Voting Rights Act.
And now what?
We have in just a few short months since the horrendous public murder of George Floyd the beginning of a ‘cancel culture’ movement.
The idea is simple and has on its face some merit. Destroy the symbols of slavery…at least the symbols. The statues, the names on buildings, the honors given to men who were by their actions racists; who clearly believed in white supremacy on every level in every aspect of life.
And we see the beginnings of a positive response to those demands.
Not in the actions of a New York Mayor who is as inadequate as the man he taunts with a sign painted on Fifth Avenue and in all the boroughs…but in the real attempt to take down symbols as a first step towards a recognition that the concept of “the other” still exists deep within our society.
What is next? Has there been a demand that all American history textbooks be re-written to align with a more truthful look at America and racism?
How much will a destruction of symbols and a correction of history mean to the lives of men, women and children living today and tomorrow?
Is LeBron James the voice who should be leading, inspiring, commanding the fundamental respect which pushes change?
Is there a plan greater than the ‘cancel culture’ out there? And if so, where and who are the leaders who can shape it into a genuine affirmative action?
When will some of the African=American academics leave their Ivy League ivory towers where they often seem to have separated themselves the way the Ben Carsons and Herman Cains do and treat their fellow African Americans as “others” as certainly as do racists.
Let’s remember that women make poor mentors to other women; that some Jews are anti-semitic
There is so much to be done for so many people that little will be done all at once. But without a plan to dig or burn out a cancer, nothing is accomplished.
Without leadership, we are less….as a nation, as a people with promises worth belief and effort.