Today Monday May 11, 2020
SARS-COV-2/COV-19 Pandemic
The coronavirus is affecting 212 countries and territories and 2 international conveyances
Total Cases: 4,252,304
Deaths: 287,133
USA Cases: 1,385,813
Deaths: 81,791
We are living in a failed state and sadly denial and dysfunction plague the U.S. government. It has failed miserably at its most basic function. In all the 40 years having lived in America off and on, I never thought I would see such a reckless and arrogant abandonment of its society and citizens by its own government. But coronavirus is not the reason America is broken it only has revealed to us what was already a completely broken system. My family left the U.K. in the mid 70’s because of a broken system. In popular recollection, the 1970’s have gone down as the dark ages, Britain’s gloomiest period since the Second World War. The seventies uncovered something fundamentally wrong about its ancient people. Which survives to diminish its authority and restrict its vision down to the present day.
Now 2020, COVID-19 has found the United States of America, it found a country with serious underlying conditions, and it exploited them ruthlessly. Chronic ills, a corrupt political class, an unresponsive bureaucracy, a heartless economy and a divided and distracted public that has gone untreated for years. It took the scale of a pandemic to expose the severity and to shock Americans with the recognition that we are in the high-risk category. This crisis demanded a swift response, rational and collective and instead our government reacted like Pakistan or Belarus, like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders are too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering. The administration squandered two irretrievable months to prepare. From the president came will-full blindness, scapegoating, boasts and lies. From his mouthpieces, conspiracy theories and miracle cures. A few senators and corporate executives acted quickly not to prevent the coming disaster, but to profit from it. Every morning in the endless month of March and April and now May, Americans have woken up to find themselves citizens of a failed state. With no national plan and no coherent instructions at all. Families, schools, and offices have been left to decide on their own whether to shut down and take shelter and now to decide whether or not to even reopen.
Trump has seen the crisis almost entirely in personal and political terms. Fearing for his reelection, he declared the coronavirus pandemic a war, and himself a wartime president. But the leader he brings to mind is Marshal Philippe Petain, the French general who, in 1940 signed an armistice with Germany after its rout of French defenses, then formed the pro-Nazi Vichy regime. Like Petain, Trump collaborated with the invader and abandoned his country to a prolonged disaster. And, like France in 1940, America in 2020 has stunned itself with a collapse that’s larger and deeper than one miserable leader. Despite countless examples around the U.S. of individual courage and sacrifice, the failure is national. And it should force a question that most Americans have never had to ask. Do we trust our leaders and one another enough to summon a collective response to a mortal threat? Are we still capable of self-government?
Sometime in the future, maybe a century from now, when historians and other social scientists begin to write the first books about the failures of the defunct American experiment, they will all confront a basic truth: That despite American proclamations of freedom and equality, the realities of racism, misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia and gross economic inequalities as practiced in American society constantly belied these ideals. Future experts will have to consider whether America's ultimate virtues really ever had a chance to flourish, or were simply myths meant to soothe the American ego. These future researchers will have a list of events to point to that signaled the death knell of America as a superpower, a nation-state, and as an idea worth pursuing.
And that list is long: The squandering of trillions of dollars from 1945 through the 1980s on the Cold War, Vietnam, and the nuclear arms race. The presidency of Richard Nixon, Watergate, and contemptibly timid government filled with corruption. The disinvestment from the American social safety net and the massive deregulation of corporations that began during President Ronald Reagan's rule in the 1980s, proclaiming trickle-down economics and continued unabated under Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. The Gulf War in 1990-91 and the U.S. commitment to continued endless preemptive wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere in the decades since. The 2008 housing bust and the Great Recession that only further benefitted corporations while grinding millions down into poverty.
All this has led the U.S. to its current calamity, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic one that so far has claimed more than 80,000 American lives and infected 1.4 million others. It is truly an epic crisis, which America's leader President Donald Trump could have heeded advanced warnings from the World Health Organization, from the Centers for Disease Control, and from the Obama administration, making preparations and taking action. Trump could have mitigated the crisis but he has failed miserably, opting first for denial, declaring the COVID-19 warnings the Democrats' "new hoax".
The Trump administration has failed to perform the most basic function of a state: to accurately assess a threat to the country. Only the national government can oversee the response to a national outbreak by coordinating research on the nature of the disease. Only the state can ensure the national regulation and accuracy of testing, and use its fiscal and monetary might to stimulate the economy if the pandemic threatens people’s income and employment. Throughout the world, the most effective responses to the historic threat of the coronavirus have come from state governments. China imposed a lockdown of tens of millions of people in Wuhan and other cities. In Singapore, the government built an app to inform citizens how to contain the virus and what public spaces to avoid. South Korea opened a number of drive-through centers to accelerate diagnostic testing.
But in the United States, the pandemic has devolved into a kind of grotesque caricature of American federalism. The private sector has taken on quasi-state functions at a time when the executive branch of government, drained of scientific expertise and starved of moral vision and has taken on the qualities of a failed state. In a country where many individuals, companies, institutions, and local governments are making hard decisions for the good of the nation, the most important actor of them all, the Trump administration, has been a shameful bonanza of incompetence. It might seem hyperbolic to compare the U.S. government to a failed state that cannot project its authority or adequately ensure the safety of its population. But for much of the past months, the White House has shown an inability to do either.
A society that has lost its shared reality is ailing. In the past, people turned to widely respected societal institutions for information: the government, major news outlets, trusted communicators like Walter Cronkite, David Brinkley or Edward R. Murrow. Those days are long gone. Now, just about every source is suspect of bias and serving interests other than the truth. In consequence, people increasingly believe what they wish to believe, or what they find pleasing and reassuring.
As our nation slips into an economic free-fall with 33.5 million now unemployed the government is failing us. Laid of Americans are struggling, many are waiting in mile long cues for handouts of food parcels. If millions of people couldn’t afford the rent April 1st, now mid May, many cannot afford their basic utilities. Tens of thousands of small businesses, from gyms, nail salons restaurants bars have had to close and will never be able to reopen. The very fabric of our society is beginning to tear apart. People are beginning to turn into the basic animal bottom feeders. Acts of random violence perpetrated at storeowners or restaurant workers because of social distancing rules and having to wear a facemask. Armed angry protestors parading around donning Kevlar and carrying military style weapons of war and a Colorado man who discussed attending a coronavirus protest at the state capitol was charged with possession of pipe bombs and additional bomb making material found at his home. The gunning down and outright brutal murder of a bright young African American male in Georgia who just was out for a morning jog was hunted and killed by a white former police officer and his son. A 21 year-old black male shoots and kills a 45 year-old white female postal worker in Michigan simply because he didn’t receive his stimulus check. Two McDonald’s employees were shot after telling a customer the dining area was closed. A Pennsylvania man ploughs his SUV through a crowd of first responders at “Salute to Nurses” parade amid pandemic. America has always been a violent nation if not the most violent nation on earth but the seams are starting to unravel. And I fear this is just the tip of the iceberg. The coronavirus pandemic is only in its early stages, the economic disaster is going to get much worse and the amount of unemployed will increase exponentially. But I have a very bad feeling that a storm is coming and the once “America the Beautiful” is going to get very ugly indeed!
P.S
When I look at our society there seems to be a kind of anguish rippling through it. Broken dreams, shattered expectations, lost possibilities. Is a happy life, much less a fulfilled one even possible in times like these? It’s a profound understatement to say: it’s not easy living through times like these. It’s truer to say: we live in an abusive society. The abuse of power, of values like decency and truth and purpose, of each other, and of our selves has become dismal, gruesome normality. We have to begin protecting ourselves from all that, to become mature, healthy people, to retain our sanity and our humanity, instead of being consumed by despair and fatalism and anger.
Stay Strong, Serene and Smart
Stay safe and healthy
Always Be A Hard Target