I want you to think about the little things you do during the day. You listen to a song. That's 3 or 4 minutes, right? Maybe you saw a little thing on YouTube that didn't take that long, so you shared it socially and put a little half paragraph on the post as a signature. Maybe you got up and got a sandwich and something to drink. Maybe you went out for a smoke. Or maybe you had to do the bathroom. There's stuff like that all over the footprint of your day. 2 to 5 minute chunks of your life. You don't begrudge it. There's stuff you wanted. Stuff you needed. Stuff you had to do. That's life, right?
Now consider the idea that every time you did that, someone died of a pathogen or plague that a terrorist or foreign power released into your country. Or if we want to make the idea a little bit more visceral, picture someone with an assault rifle being allowed to roam freely through the streets of a major city. He's got a stopwatch on a lanyard round his neck. And every time it counts 80 seconds and beeps, he aims at a random person and shoots them dead. Doesn't matter who. It could be that old person crossing the crosswalk. It could be that parent holding their kid's hand as they come out of a building. It could be a loved one who happened to be in town on an errand. No reprieve. No assistance from anyone in authority. No one's doing anything to stop him.
Bang. Dead.
Hold that thought for a moment. Picture the blood and brains on the pavement. Take a good long steamy gawk at what's left of that person as their murderer walks in the general direction of that way. He's already resetting his stopwatch for the next kill. He could be on a walk in the park. There's a smile on his face. No one can touch him. A third of the people around you shrug, as if resigned to it. Some of them cheer the shooter on, hoping he'll shoot some ethnicity they personally hate. The rest duck for cover and pray it won't be them or someone they love next.
This, in an extroverted way, is happening already.
I was going through my newsfeeds this morning and caught a piece from MSN. They talked about how other countries in the world are breathing free. They're still wearing masks cos the threat isn't over yet. In much of the civilized world, they're on the other side of the bell curve as far as the COVID-19 Novel Coronavirus. They can go out of their houses and be reasonably sure they're not playing Russian roulette with the real world equivalent of Stephen King's lethal superflu from The Stand, AKA, 'Captain Trips'.
Here, our President is hawking quack cures, advising people poison themselves with bleach, putting the opinions of religious nutjobs into a false equivalency with the scientific method and putting the stock market ahead of his citizenry's life and limb. Nineteen years ago, we went to endless war against a self-manufactured enemy. The official line was that it was in retaliation for the two-thousand plus lives that were cut short when the World Trade Center was struck down in the heart of New York City by two hijacked passenger jets.
We've nearly lost one-hundred times that in the last year to a plague allowed to run riot by a psychotic moron and his atrocity of self-serving abettors.
One-hundred times that.
And every 80 seconds, on average, another American citizen dies of it.
You've probably got a tab open in your browser on YouTube right now. Have a look at the last thing you watched. Divide its length by 80 seconds. How many people were effectively murdered by biological proxy in the time it took you to watch it? Looking over in my browser, there's Fleetwood Mac's 'Rhiannon'. Three minutes, forty-eight seconds.
That's nearly three people murdered by malicious negligence and incompetence.
Were this a shooter, the news cycle would be all over it. That's a different grim cycle. Gunfire, dead people, public mourning, anti-assault rifle outcry, demands for justice, political deflection on behalf of the gun-lobby, gunfire, rinse and repeat. The memes would be all over your own newsfeeds and homepages. Talking heads would point their fingers. People would cradle their beloved dead. Stories of heroes would be made if some brave person lost their life taking down the killer. If it were a disaster, maybe a movie or biopic would get made.
Can you imagine the response if some terrorist organization's nightmare scenario played out and some bastard of an explosive went off and killed everyone at the Super Bowl; how absolutely insane our country would go if someone killed more than two-hundred thousand of our countrymen in a single instance? We're getting into historical numbers here. Numbers people say in the same sentence with adages like 'Never again'. The first time an atomic bomb was used to actually kill people in Hiroshima, the estimated toll was between ninety and one-hundred and fifty thousand people.
Covid-19 has now killed more people than that in the United States. As a matter of fact, the novel coronavirus has now killed more twice the number of Americans killed in every war and armed conflict our country has fought since World War II ended in 1945. That would include both the Vietnam and the Korean wars, as well as all our endless middle eastern wars since the first Bush administration in the early 1990's. Do you remember when you watched 'M*A*S*H*' or 'Platoon' or 'Born in the USA' and how those wars were presented to you; how they were shown to you baldfaced with none of the horror restrained? Do you remember how those conflicts were described as 'meat-grinders' that our youth were fed into? Do you remember the protests and the widespread schism that put family against one another in revulsion of the violence and the mounting avalanche of the dead?
Covid-19 has killed twice that now. This conflict is on our own soil. And it's killing civilians.
In the midst of this plague, our president downplayed the threat deliberately. He allowed it to spread. On the advice of his son-in-law, they purposely let it spread in the hopes that infection rates would stunt voter turnout in democratic-controlled states. They literally weaponized a plague in the hopes it would kill a large number of the ideological opposition. They ran the numbers... or maybe they didn't even do that. They did their equivalent of thinking about it. They considered (or maybe they didn't) the death toll, as well as how many of their own supporters this plague might also kill. And you know? They were alright with that. As long as their White House stooge kept the aegis of the presidency, he couldn't be thrown in prison for crimes against humanity, right? What's a few tens of thousands of low income people anyway? After all, it's not like they're contributing to the re-election campaign.
This is what you call passive genocide. The current regime just happened to luck into a plague to do their dirty work for them. Oligarchs don't like to get their hands dirty. So just as they were getting their concentration camps up and running, (which are still running, by the way) they found they didn't need to quite fire up the ovens or activate the worst of DHS and the Border Patrol SS. The plague would take care of it for them. They'd just need to remember to invest in the insurance and healthcare industry and let them jack up prices. They're fine with a win-lose situation, as long as they're winning.
There's monuments to the honored dead in our military conflicts. I've been to and touched some of them. I've felt with my own hands the groove of the fifty-eight thousand odd names etched into the black marble wall of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington DC. It's a soul-interrupting experience seeing yourself reflected in that mirror-polished stone where people still leave flowers and gifts fifty years later. Stipends are paid to the families who survived our soldiers slain in combat; buried with honors in Arlington. There's more monuments too; to the survivors of natural disasters, or any number of horrors visited on our 'minorities' and indigenous peoples. The victims are remembered with reverence and sadness. We talk about the horrors of war and fascist despots responsible for these atrocities with visceral horror and disgust.
Except, I guess, when we elect them.
Even now, a third of the Republican caucus is working the right-wing ratchet effect. They're hemming and hawing about how NOW there's no money to help the citizenry. There was a horrifying gallows humor joke about how we've been left to fend for ourselves that I saw. About how 'for just six dollars a day, you too can sponsor an American.' Like the Sally Struthers C.A.R.E. commercials of old. Hell, Sarah McLaughlan saw that post and offered to provide a soundtrack if the original poster needed it.
No money? It was only after blowing a four-trillion dollar hole in our country's economy to bail out the companies the fascists hold stock in (unless they dumped it with insider knowledge they can't be prosecuted for), that the rest of the country got twelve-hundred bucks each... maybe... If you qualified for it... Cos they're not doing shit about our healthcare crisis. 'So try not to catch the plague.' they tell us. You know, unless your kids come home from school with it this fall, which they're still trying to re-open. Kids aren't really known for spreading transmissible diseases, right? The government wouldn't do that to YOU. That kind of thing? You're thinking blankets dipped in cholera more than a century or two ago.
Except you're not.
They're sending you out to work. They've stripped you of any of the protections you'd normally have in an emergency situation like this where your income or job might be protected. They've left you no alternative. They're sending your kids out to school so you can return to work. They want their bottom line worked. And your countrymen are dying to the tune of one per eighty seconds from an airborne transmissable disease that you won't have symptoms of WHILE you're contagious. But it will certainly wreck your body or kill you in a couple of weeks. Their supporters are wandering around bitching about how masks are a threat to their freedoms. They're walking around with masks half-on with their noses poking out. If they wear them at all. If they had their sex-organs out, they'd be arrested immediately. But being a walking plague-vector? They're fine with that. Hell, you might be someone they want dead anyway.
Passively.
Do you get it yet? Are you angry yet? Are you voting yet? Have you asked for your absentee ballot yet? Are you considering the survival of yourself and your loved ones yet? This is not just a plague situation. Do you honestly believe our current administration, who are right now campaigning NOT to help you in the Senate are going to suddenly give a damn about you if they're somehow able to steal the general election? Have they been what you'd call a caring and compassionate administration up til now? No? Okay... here's an easier one. Have they been what you'd call honest, or competent? Still too high a bar? Have they actually been shooting and kidnapping people in the streets while running concentration camps and letting nearly two-hundred thousand people goddamn die of real life Captain Trips?
Still too high a bar?
This is not merely conspiracy theory. It's plastered across every network news site that isn't run by some right-wing nutjob. The numbers are irrefutable. We are now facing a death toll more atrocious than all the wars we've fought in the last 75 years. This is happening. Now. To people you know. And every time you or your family leave your home, you risk it happening to you. And that's if you're lucky enough to have a home. At the end of this month, millions more of us may not.
The president must be removed from office, as well as his vice, his cabinet, and his abettors in the Senate, the House of Representatives and the judges he has appointed in his term. He must be made to stand trial for his perversion of our government and the violation of the highest oath in our land. He must be imprisoned for genocide until such time as his black and vile heart ceases to beat, along with every one of his abettors who have undeniably proved themseves as existential threats to our fellow countrymen's lives. They must be made to answer for this. And the first step is to take their offices away from them by voting. You must do this. And you must be ready to take the next step if they try to disenfranchise you of it.
There are more than one-hundred and ninety-five thousand Americans dead.
And the death rate here, in the United States is still climbing.
What's it going to take, folks? Cos the really, REALLY horrible thing about that grim statistic of 80 seconds? That was reported on the major US networks on August 5th. That's month old news. Cos as bad as I made things out to be in this rant?
It's worse than that already.
