You Go, Lady Liberty...!

 I’m just gonna leave this here, to let y’all know I’m still  alive.  I finally have a seed of an idea for the next “Ten Things About COVID” post, which I’ll hopefully get up before the end of the month. Meanwhile, enjoy this, and cross your fingers that Lady Liberty can shoot very, very far...

"She Was Just Seventeen...!"

 I have been SO disinclined to compose...anything. 

The election, Mango Mussolini, COVID, wildfires...

It's all I can do just to get up in the morning and keep myself busy and distracted for 16 hours, so I can go back to bed and slip into blessed separation from all the crap that's going on in the world.

And I distracted myself SO much, I missed my own Blog-a-versary.

Happy, Seventeenth, Coming To Terms!

I still love ya!

Ain't This The Truth...

 

 

What EVERYONE Is Thinking Right Now...

Ten Things About COVID-19 Number 7: Trump's Re-election Strategy

Rampant pandemic. Economy in the crapper. Double-digit unemployment. Epidemic of police brutalizing black citizens, resulting in riots. Americans pointing guns at Americans. THIS is MAGA America, @realDonaldTrump. YOUR dumpster fire. 

Own it. 

And prepare to go down for it.

Ten Things About COVID-19: Number Six

6.) School’s Out...Forever?

We’re half a year into a pandemic that arguably half the global population does not want to acknowledge.  Humans world-wide refuse to change their behavior in order to protect themselves from a positively identified danger.  They go so far as to create elaborate tales explaining why the scientific community has “invented” this pandemic so some not quite identified dastardly entity can take over the world.  Of course, the simple explanation is, “There is a nasty illness spreading across the globe. It could kill you. It more likely will kill your mother and dad or your friend undergoing cancer treatment. You must do these things to protect yourself/them from it.”

WHY IS THAT SO HARD?????

As we approach school season in the US, pandemic-deniers are clamoring to send the children back to school. Get them out from underfoot so their parents can go back to the crappy service jobs that replaced their REAL jobs after the 2008 crash, and our shitty “consumer economy” can get rolling in full force again.   And Trump and his amazingly far-reaching cabal can claim victory and solidify their stranglehold on the US for four more years.

I understand that in 21^st-century America, sending one’s kids off to state-funded daycare, umm…I mean school, was part of the package deal of procreation.  You only have to care for them 24/7 for the first 5 or 6 years of their lives, then you ship them off to school.  Get them out from under your feet for 8 hours a day and let someone else take the burden for awhile.  It’s a pretty attractive deal, really; and in the 2020 US economy, also an economic necessity.  Likely, both Mom and Dad need to have an income in order to maintain the somewhere-between-rich-and-poor lifestyle that has been rapidly eroding over the past 50 years.  Especially now that living-wage blue-collar jobs are a thing of the distant past.

So when people in the top levels of leadership start spouting bullshit like, “Kids don’t catch COVID-19” or “The science says that children can’t be carriers of the virus,” frazzled, worn-down, desperate parents are going to cling to that crap like shipwrecked sailors clinging to bits of floating debris.  If they thought about this at all, they would recall that children are and always have been little germ farms, and schools are and always have been giant petrie dishes where kids get, share, and bring home every bacterium, bug and virus known to mankind.  So why would THIS virus, which has been proven extremely transmittable, especially in indoor environments where humans are packed together for several hours at a time, NOT act the same as every other illness children get and bring home from school?

It doesn’t make sense, does it?  But right now, people are SO done with staying home and adhering (or not) to pandemic protocol, they are more than willing to let someone tell them what they want to hear, rather than use their own powers of reason…which might tell them that the folks saying school will be “safe” are full of shit.  

I don’t have kids.  I don’t have grandkids, or nephews or nieces of school age, so on a certain level, I don’t have a dog in this particular fight.  And I can muster up a modicum of sympathy for the parents whose lives have been upended and are desperate to get their lives back to “normal.”  Reality is a bitch, here. 

But the sooner we realize that “normal” is never coming back, the sooner we’ll get a leg up on this thing and be able to move forward again.  We have to embrace a new normal that is going to involve systems and procedures that are very different from what we’ve become accustomed to.  We are humans.  We are (theoretically) adaptable.  If we can’t/won’t adapt, we will end up where every species that has reached the limits of its adaptability has gone since the beginning of life on the planet: Extinct.  Dead as the dinosaurs. 

Is that what we want?  Because that is where we seem determined to allow ourselves to be led.    

Ten Things about COVID-19: Number Five

5.) Masking the Issue

The global medical community has been all over the map with advice to us poor contagious peons on how to slow the spread of COVID-19, and keep ourselves from catching it. 

It started out with, “Wash your hands and don’t touch your face.”  From there, it quickly jumped to “Shut everything down, stay home, don’t go out in public unless absolutely necessary.”  Early on, the mask question came up, and the experts scoffed and told us wearing masks would not be beneficial, so don’t bother. 

As time went on and infection raged, it turned out societies that were masking up were actually having success controlling spread.  So…uh-oh. We were wrong.  Masks are good.  Masks are great.  Wear a mask.

Now, I understand that dealing with a new contagion is a learn-on-the-fly sort of thing.  As time goes by and we learn more about the virus, its action and how it spreads, advice to the public on how to stay safe is going to change.  Unfortunately, this process is corrupted by our 21^st-century. instantaneous-but-not-necessarily-vetted-or-true method of broadcasting “news.”  Every entity on the planet charged with passing information on to the public is more interested in clicks and “views” than in getting the info straight.  The goal is to get eyes on THEIR medium.  Not to make sure the information sent out is good or useful or even safe.  And if it produces controversy, even better.  More clicks.

So, in the space of five months, we’ve gone from, “No need for masks” to “You HAVE to wear a mask” coming from the “expert” scientific community. Very fertile ground for the modern American “choose your own reality” crowd.   

And you have a POTUS whose policy on this nasty virus (that China sent over by way of the Democrats, to sabotage his reelection chances) amounts to “It will disappear.”  And, as such, refuses to wear a mask, and even goes so far as to say on camera that people wear masks to show their opposition to HIM. 

Now we have solidly politicized the wearing of masks; as even the smallest, least significant issue in this country has been politicized since the rise of the Tea Party and the Evangelical Right. There’s no such thing as quiet opposition.  Every god damn thing has to be a reason for us to hate and bully and smear each other.  It has to be loud and rude and ugly.

So Americans are beating the crap out of each other for wearing/not wearing masks.

And since mask-wearing has to be close to universal for it to really be effective… Case numbers, hospitalizations and deaths are experiencing a meteoric rise in the USA as we ignore any scientific advice we don't like and indulge in our ill-advised “re-opening” to save our crappy consumer economy and make sure we can keep the flow of $$$ into the pockets and off-shore bank accounts of the rich.  While we peons grovel in the trenches, intent on butchering each other, using the virus or any other means available.  No matter.  As long as those cash registers start to ring again.

Which leads me to wonder...how many ways can one pandemic kill us?                            

Ten Things About COVID-19: Number Four

4.) Testing: one, two, 40 million…

“Test, trace, quarantine.” That has been the recipe for success for all the nations of the world which have got the upper hand on the pandemic and are attempting to, and mostly succeeding at, restarting their economies after the virus clubbed them almost to death.  We’ve known this formula for months.  It’s no secret.

But testing has been a nightmare in the US from the beginning.  Five months in, it’s STILL a nightmare.  I'll go out on a limb and posit that America’s miserable for-profit health system coupled with our obscene-profit-driven pharmaceutical culture have multiplied by a factor of 1000 the logistical challenges of manufacturing, distributing and administering tests to Joe Average Citizen.  Because for decades, these forces have reduced health care in the US to “Who’s going to spend money on it? (Not me!  Not me!  Not me!)” vs “Who’s going to make money on it? (Me!  Me!  Mememememememememeeeeee!)  Obviously, this “system” does not work as a method for providing medical care for all who need it.  In fact, it’s not designed to provide medical care to those who NEED it.  Only to those who can afford it.  And afford to pay the “middle man” on top of that; the one who makes life and death decisions based on the financial bottom line rather than the best interest of the patient. 

So of course, when something like a pandemic comes along where the medical/pharmaceutical culture needs to put public health over profits, we have a system that is set up to fail.  Miserably.  And so it has.

After five months, there STILL aren’t enough tests.  Some reports say the tests we do have result in up to a 30% false negative rate.  And yet, those shitty tests are still reporting exponential spread of the virus in states—mainly in the south and west—that attempted to “re-open” before coming close to having the virus under control.  Or even possessing the tools to determine control. 

And here’s where the Toddler-in-Chief comes in.  COVID is hurting his reelection bid. First, it was because the virus was causing the market to crash.  Now, it’s because his dismal failure to step up and lead the nation through the crisis (rather than trying to lie, bully and minimize it into submission) has actually peeled the scales from the eyes of some of his less brainwashed supporters. 

Trump repeatedly claims, out loud, in front of the cameras, that the reason we have so many cases is because we’re doing too much testing.  Less testing, less cases.  He honestly believes this.  Like, if I don’t take a pregnancy test, I can’t be pregnant. 

He’s admitted that he asked states to slow down testing.  That didn’t go over too well.  So, now, he’s decided to discredit his own medical experts and the CDC, bypass them and have all COVID statistics from hospitals across the nation sent to the White House instead of the CDC.  If he can’t convince them to slow testing, then by god he’ll just withhold or monkey with the numbers.  It never enters his or his accomplices' minds that the “cases” he fails to reveal will be dying alone in the hallways of overwhelmed hospitals, their mortal remains shuttled to refrigerated truck containers as funeral homes are engulfed in or unwilling to handle contaminated bodies, possibly buried in mass graves without ceremony or loved ones present.  

Or perhaps it does enter their minds…they just don’t care.  Collateral damage of the Trump Reelection Campaign.  No price too high, as long it’s not Mango Mussolini suffering or dying. 

It boggles the mind, really.

Test, trace, quarantine.  We can't even get the first step right.

                  

Ten Things About COVID-19: Number Three

3.) Viral Politics

 

In February, world stock markets started tanking as the effects of COVID-19 on global production and consumption began to become evident.  Donald Trump panicked.  He saw his reelection campaign—based upon his arrogant (and erroneous) claims that he alone had blessed America with the most prosperous economy on earth—dragged down precipitously with the dive of the Dow Jones. 

So he did the first thing that came to his mind.  The first thing that always comes to his mind; his knee-jerk reaction to anything he sees as a threat to his personal bubble of dominance and celebrity.

He lied.

He obfuscated.   He downplayed.  He scoffed. 

And as it became apparent that all those things were not going to stop COVID from taking hold in the US, he ramped up the blame.  It’s the Democrats’ fault.  It’s China’s fault.  It’s the WHO’s fault.  It’s the doctors’ fault.  Along with, “I take no responsibility at all.”

THIS is how a pandemic becomes political.  Put an ignorant, pompous, self-aggrandizing, pandering con man cult leader in charge of one of the premier nations of the world.  And when he’s faced with something he perceives as a threat to his power and position, and he can’t lie or blame his way around it, he creates utter chaos.  All in an effort to save his own ass.  Because that is all he cares about.

That’s how we end up with citizens spitting on each other at supermarkets, screaming about their “rights” when asked to mask up; promoting the idea that old people should be willing to die in order to “save the economy;”  studiously aping the man in the highest office in the land, the guy who shamelessly lies, bullies, obfuscates and points fingers in order to make things go his way. 

We could never have hoped that the dyed orange leopard in the White House would change his spots, get serious and LEAD the nation through this quagmire.  Or understand that he didn’t have the necessary knowledge or experience to do so, and yield the floor to experts who did.  We know that would be far too opposite of his nature to even consider.

But could we not have hoped that he would just do…nothing?

If you can’t fix it, ignore it.  It will go away.

All he really had to do was SHUT THE FUCK UP.  Then we might at least not have made a deadly disease an internal war.  An “Us vs Them” situation.  We might not be throwing “COVID parties” and ripping masks off our neighbors’ faces and hiding in our homes because our fellow citizens think it’s their patriotic duty to laugh off a pandemic and act as if it isn’t happening.

But no. 

He started out lying and agitating and bullying.  And he’s going to go right on with that strategy.  Every day.  Several times a day.

To what end?  We don’t really know.  The only thing we know for sure is, it won’t be pretty.

Maybe the virus has been over-hyped.  Maybe we won’t be overwhelmed with death and long-lasting health and economic effects that will cripple the country.

But the politicization of COVID19, if not the virus itself, has done lingering, devastating damage to the spirit, the soul, of the United States of America.

Because a vain, ignorant cult-leader “president” couldn’t leave it alone.