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A NATION, STATE, COUNTY, AND CITY… COME UNDONE
There was plenty of warning. There was a lot of warning about the fact that the CDC (National Center for Disease Control, had been defunded and broken down into more or less an agency without resources, supplies, and money. The CDC budget was cut prior to the appearance of the novel virus. CDC leadership also had little hope of having an educated experienced team to handle the appearance of a pandemic. That team was disbanded under the current president’s watch. This disarray, plus marked presentations and policies intended to disregard social distancing, closing select businesses and group assembly places, and not using masks to prevent the spread of the disease, have caused the rate of the spread of the virus to reach its highest levels ever, and those levels are still rising as you read this.
On top of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the fear and suppressed hysteria its spreading existence creates and propagates, there is also the election. Normally, elections for the presidential position are concluded on election night, or the next morning at the latest. This was not the case in the Bush/Gore election, as so many people will remember. Instead of accepting the results in Florida, which favored Gore, the television stations were required to retract their “calling” of the election and wait to consider a recount and analysis of procedure in that state. The U.S. Supreme Court, acting nearly as novel as the novel virus of today, decided to stop everything and call the election for the Republican candidate. The court decided that with a Republican majority. Those results, as well as the simple, near mind-blowing fact that the State of Florida was run by none other than George Bush Jr.’s brother, were quietly accepted by all.
Everything about propriety, history, and the real American way (the real ‘supposed’ American way) was put aside, and the leadership of the country was turned over to a man who would stay president for eight years. The United States was financially decimated during those years, as bankers, financial houses, and legislators waded into the mortgage business and basically took everything in sight. Eventually, under the succeeding president (Obama), the financial houses and banks who initiated the legal theft were, one and all, bailed out by the taxpayers. The mortgages of the people losing their houses were not bailed out. The banks and financial houses were given the money they lost in the foreclosures, and then they were deeded the foreclosed homes too.
What is happening today? The nation understands, at least a good measure of the population, that the country’s big financial houses and wealthy industrialists are, by and large, too big to fail and too important to prosecute. The U.S. recovered under the benevolent, although non-punishing, the leadership of Barrack Obama. Then Donald Trump took over and the coffers of the U.S. Treasury have been drained dry again, this time because the onset of the novel virus was not only ignored by the leadership but denied. Right up to the election, the country’s leader refused to support the universal wearing of masks indoors and in packed groups. He refused to require distancing at all. He refused to lead. And now, the nation is undone by these two tremendous life-changing courses of belief and behavior, and all of us must somehow put it all together again.
Can the Humpty Dumpty of this fractured country be reassembled so that the wonder of free capitalistic life, as existed just a few years ago, can go on, hopefully without any members of the republican administration sitting in places of authority wherein the public’s money is available to be possessed, instead of expended upon a very hurt public, and the things it so badly needs?
Hopefully, you voted. Hopefully, real change will result because you made that effort.
