Monday, September 14, 2020

Passive Genocide, and the Horror of 80 Seconds

 


    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.

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