Day 1212 – The Political Pandemic

Day 1212 – The Political Pandemic

Thursday May 14, 2020 

171 Days until the election on November 3^rd

251 Days until the Inauguration on January 20, 2021

Let me introduce two ideas to begin. Actually, I’m going to call them idea/images, because I want you to not only grasp the idea but also what it looks like. 

The first is the phrase “by thought, word, and deed.” It’s part of the communion ceremony I grew up with. (Episcopal Church – Rite I) 

The other is the idea of a foreign agent embedded in our country, but with a twist. What if there was no external country directing the actions of this agent, but this agent was a product of our own making? Kind of a variant on Pogo’s famous line, “We have seen the enemy and them is us.” 

In all the foreign agent movies, books, and themes the idea is that the person or entity is bent on doing our country harm, of destroying it, or remaking it. Be it “AmeriKa”, “The Manchurian Candidate,” “The Man in the High Castle,” or “The 39 Steps.”

What if that enemy is within? What if it is us, or a big portion of us? What then?

America is a dream. It is an ideal. Something to aspire towards, “The Shining City on the Hill.” We celebrate this notion in many of our Hollywood films. A subgenera is the honest cop fighting against the corrupt system. It doesn’t have to be a cop, sometimes it’s a politician, or an average person. In the end good triumphs over evil. 

Let us consider where we are today.

In the latest round of news. 

– Two of the people the president likes are being released from prison early because of the coronavirus and one, who is not liked, is not being released.

– The White House has squashed the CDC paper that would tell people how to safely re-enter the world. There are two version of this report: the 17 page, and the 69 page one. The White House has told some of the CDC folks that the 17 page report will never see the light of day. Forget the longer report. 

– The Justice Department is trying to drop a case against an individual who basically pled guilty to treason. 

– In Wisconsin the governor of the state issued a “stay at home” order. The state’s supreme court has overturned that order saying it is unconstitutional. (Michigan will be up next.)

– The president is asking people to go back out into the world and get the economy going. Yet, the key to doing this is testing. We don’t have adequate testing and the president refuses to marshall resources so that we could. 

– Workers in meat processing plants are being told to go back to work, despite the huge outbreaks of the virus at their work location. They are not being given adequate protection or testing. If they refuse to go back they are being threatened with no unemployment checks. (They have a job. They refuse to go back!) Additionally, many of the workers are illegally here so they have the additional threat of being deported. (Why don’t we use the word “exported”? I don’t know.)

– Many red state, rural, Republican governors are opening up their economies despite warnings from health officials. One such official is the man who was in charge of developing vaccines for our country, now fired, now a whistleblower, who testified to Congress yesterday. He said this winter will be very dark unless we get a nation wide response to this virus. (Ha! Good Luck with that.)

So that is the state of the union as I see it. Actually, those are the facts that I will use to draw conclusions about the state of the union. 

We do not have adequate testing and it does not look like we will anytime soon.

We do not have any contact tracing program in place or on the horizon.

We do not have any national response to this virus and the president and those around him seem unable or unwilling to do so.

All this has been known, but what is new for me is the recognition that the president, along with the White House, the Attorney General, and many governors and now conservative court justices at the state level are actively working to let this virus physically destroy us, while at the same time those same individuals and entities are doing everything they can to destroy America. At least the America I knew, and grew up with. 

By the time November rolls around I’m not sure what will be left. By January and inauguration we will be in the midst of the worst economic disaster and pandemic this country has ever faced. 

The sad thing is – it didn’t have to happen. That’s another thing to know.

Oh yeah, the first idea I mentioned. It’s not until one gets their thoughts, actions, and act they are saying all in alignment that one can be effective. Think of our president, his administration, and where we are. “Thought, word, and deed” or as we used to say, “Get your sh*t together.”

We are a long way from that and there’s an active movement to make sure it doesn’t happen. This is a disease far worse than the virus we are facing. It has infected so many.

171 Days until the election on November 3^rd

251 Days until the Inauguration on January 20, 2021

PS Between a rock and a rock.