Now that the Covid-19 Pandemic is at our doorsteps looming to be the cause of the death of Millions around the world, suddenly and ironically political commentators are all expressing the desire that they hope that President, Donald Trump, succeeds… and that he comes around and starts doing things right..
Well, La Dee Dah, but you will have to excuse me if I do not jump on this newly minted band wagon of generous understanding… and instead declare (loud and clear) that those days are long since over. We are smack, dab in the middle of “too little too late”…about 2 months ago. I don’t know if Donald is insane, totally corrupt, totally inept or some combination of all three… but he has had more than adequate time to do the right thing. And he has failed. There is no nice way to describe this President’s complete lack of leadership at this critical time in history… when it should have been so easy to step up and redeem himself from the preceding 3 years of continual indecencies. But the fact is that he is, very simply, constitutionally unable to do so.
I am not a great fan of constant complaining and “what if scenarios”, but in this case I’ll make an exception because the disasters that will result from his continual stumbling and bumbling are too devastating. His press briefings, ala pep rallies, are shameful and disgusting. The lies and cover-ups and puffery (The Easter Weekend Resurrection of “Back to Normal Living”) are unpatriotic betrayals of the trust that 60 million voters granted him… to be their true compass forward with their lives in his hands. With all due respect, there is not one of these voters who went into the voting booth and said to himself/herself, “I cannot wait to cast my vote for the person who will be greatest liar of all time”.
This virus has exposed the secret underbelly, the great weakness of our Democratic way of life in a capitalistic system, in which it has always been true that our basic ethos is that profiting at the expense of our competitors is the way of our world. The problem is that some folks are so good at it, that we are out of balance with an income/wealth disparity between the haves and the have nots that is a tragedy in our country, the wealthiest in the history of the world. We need not delve into a complicated, esoteric analysis of the fact that 50% of our people are living at the poverty level…or that 90% of the wealth in our country is controlled by 10% of the population. It’s not so much Democrat versus Republican, or liberal versus conservative or white versus black….it is more the “get it while you can…at all costs (rules or not)” crowd versus “those who play by the rules” crowd…of all stripes.
The problem for those who play by the rules and do the best they can can…is that sometimes they are not smart enough or talented enough or motivated enough … and as a result the great majority of them (us) are always going to get the short end.
So here we are at a crossroads where our President is advocating for a proposal that old people are expendable and should die to save the country from his mistakes. I prefer instead that we get this guy, President Trump, bound and gagged and out of the way ASAP… so additional effort coordinated from the top, an “all-hands-on-deck” effort can be implemented as soon as possible. He does not have the ability to do it and people are dying waiting for him to get it together.
Until we have a national leadership that recognizes that the federal government is NOT the enemy, NOT the Deep State… but that it is the entity which can protect and develop a more perfect union for everyone, we will be a country whose national leadership has abandoned its role to use the levers of government to uplift…and to actually protect the physical immune systems of half of a struggling population who is actually malnourished physically…and as a result malnourished spiritually and psychically.
If this Covid-19 Pandemic has taught us anything, it is that the greedy “grab all that you can” mentality, which has dominated for at least the last 50 years mostly under a government controlled by the GOP, can no longer prevail. We are all in this life together, which means that my grand mother was right… “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”. That must be our ethos going forward including our federal agencies staffed by professionals to protect our environment, our national health and our education… of young and old alike.
The Donald Trump Administration is a classic example of the unbridled greed, vindictiveness and corruption of the “grab it while you can” mentality, that we never needed. Too many American people have voted for this crowd in the past.
Maybe this Covid-19 pandemic will be the wake-up call for the change that we can make in November. The world is watching.
