They tell me, well-meaning people do, that it helps to get stuff like this off my chest. But no, it doesn’t. It truly doesn’t.
Right now, I’m worried about what could happen down in my chest. I’m holding my breath and counting to 10, 20, 25, gasp. I’m questioning how well I can taste this thing or that, how well I can smell. Do I feel warm? Oh, shit, I feel warm, don’t I?
Because, why? Because this is where we are:
>>> Trump, the President, someone’s President, lied outright this past weekend that a couple of American car companies are now making ventilators — a desperately needed medical supply to keep COVID-19 lung-failing patients even alive. There is, of course, a monumental shortage of these air-giving, life-keeping machines. And no car companies are making them.
>>> He has sung the praises, over and over, and again today, of untested “cures” — including chloroquine phosphate, an additive used to clean fish tanks, which itself has now killed a desperate elderly man in Phoenix who sought it out for COVID-19 protection.
>>> He lied through his teeth about possible-vaccine timelines. By a factor of a year. A year.
>>> He initially ignored outright, and called a hoax, the coming hellish health crisis, that even non-medical people like me, without advisors yammering at our side, knew was set to unleash a literal plague upon us, to try to keep Wall Street from noticing (it did, quickly, and all of our retirement plans died, so even if we all do live …), as domestic cases were already surfacing in Washington state.
>>> He stokes blatant racism against our own citizens, all minus a single caring word for those who are suffering, including that one New Jersey family who lost four members mere days apart, all of whom were just days before unwise to the horror ahead, the clear horror Trump had been briefed on at least a month before. All of these poor people, just living their American lives.
>>> He had to be pressured — pressured — to enact the Stafford Act, to make rapid emergency measures a reality, and then only doing so for a couple of states, when in two weeks, by most reasonable measures, we will all be up to our eyeballs in American death, no ifs, no ands, no buts.
>>> He said only today that in two weeks — yes, again, two weeks, when infectious disease experts everywhere say the impending peak of this moving tragedy will be starting to reap its grim bounty across most of the U.S. — he will possibly do away with all this inconvenient social distancing and tell businesses to reopen, cuz the cure “cannot be worse than the problem itself,” thus starting the cycle of fear and suffering and death and economic demise all over again. So maybe your dear elderly mother somehow lived through Round One. But, oops, in Round Two, Trump’s obsession with the NASDAQ says to hell with her, she’s old, so … so what?
Where is the national stay-at-home order?
Where are the orders to at least double hospital bed capacity in all major urban centers?
Where are the essential medical supplies — not just the ventilators, but the masks, gloves, sanitizers, protective gowns, goggles, etc., that have been promised and re-promised by the Trump administration, almost daily for the last several days?
Where is the evidence that anyone has paid a single bit of fucking attention to the consuming horror that is right now Italy? That was China? That may be again Hong Kong?
Where, where, where, where?
And why? Why?
Why is this happening? The greatest nation on Earth, and we are now sliding down the sinking ship’s body as the orchestra plays.
So come on, you MAGA men who love a “straight talker,” you KAG ladies who say Christine Blasey Ford wasn’t compelling in her testimony, tell me again how great this President is, this greed-hearted charlatan “chosen by God,” while I agonize about this insatiable, incurable monster of a virus soon killing people I love and respect (it will; oh, it will), laying waste to families and shuttering businesses all around me. Go on, tell me.
I dare you.
Hillary Clinton’s emails, right? Let’s talk about those. And Hunter Biden’s whatever the hell disproven thing Hunter Biden is supposed to have done? Let’s all pound our chests about that.
Goddamn you.
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