The last time that we had a news story that proved anywhere near as huge and impactful as this coronavirus thing, it would have been the September 11th attacks, back in 2001. That was different than this, of course. Those were attacks, and they were surreal, with a theatrical quality to it that the terrorists who planned it surely knew, because if you did not know any better, it almost might have felt a bit like watching a movie. There were these planes filled with oil crashing into skyscrapers with a whole city filled with spectators present, and many of them with cameras. Then, the video of people trapped and jumping from the tops of the skyscrapers to escape the blistering heat, before both of those buildings ultimately collapsed. So we got these unbelievable images of jets crashing into the Twin Towers of New York’s World Trade Center, and then the buildings themselves collapsing, as well as reports (without the visuals) of the places crashing into the Pentagon in Washington, and a field in Pennsylvania.
It made for incredible images, and it seemed that everyone had a morbid fascination with watching the attacks, again and again.
This is very different. There is no one single moment, if you will, where the news event changed the world in an instant. There is no Zaputer film showing the moment that a young president was struck down by an assassin’s (or perhaps several assassins in a conspiracy?) bullet striking him down. No images of the moment the planes struck the towers, incredibly showing the precise second when the world seemed to change from what we had known before to a very different, new reality, after which the world would never be the same. No, this one was very different.
There is no specific video footage when everyone suddenly knew that the coronavirus had reached a point of being a global pandemic. You will not find dramatic images of any particular moment when a country, or indeed in this case the world, understood that we have reached a point where nothing will ever be quite the same again.
And yet, we seem to have reached that point.
What could that one moment have been? When the epidemic started to be huge news, but seemed restricted to China and South Korea? Was it when the Chinese completely shut down Wuhan, and the images of normally busy city streets being completely deserted came to us on television? Was it when the virus spread in a big way to Italy? Was it when the NBA cancelled the duration of the season on the same day that Tom Hanks became the first major celebrity in a celebrity addicted society to get the coronavirus? Was it when Trump, later that same night, gave an address and finally – albeit seemingly still reluctantly – admitted that this was, indeed, a crisis? Was it when businesses began closing, or when California became the first state (but most assuredly not the last state) to impose a mandatory stay at home, “shelter in place” order? Was it when there were images on television of a convoy of trucks in Italy carrying all of the dead away to be cremated in recent days? Will there perhaps be a more shocking than that, if the crisis continues to grow? To me, for now, I think that the images of those Italian trcks carrying the corpses of coronavirus victims is probably the most shocking, since it really brings the tragedy into light. It looks like something that you might have read about in books or movies about some kind of a plague, such as in Stephen King’s “The Stand.”
That was pretty close to surreal.
It seems that the epicenter of the coronavirus is no longer China, but Italy, where citizens apparently ignored the seriousness of the crisis, and went about their daily business like usual. But when the crisis really began to hit hard, Italy suddenly became the center of attention in terms of the coronavirus crisis. Just yesterday alone, 793 people died from the virus. To date, Italy has seen nearly well over 50,000 confirmed cases of infected, and nearly 5,000 people have died from the virus in Italy as I write this. Sadly, it is not necessarily safe to assume that the number will not reach or exceed 5,000 by the time that I get a chance to publish this. Historically, Italy is no stranger to tragic viruses.
Here in the United States, this latest crisis has had a profound impact already, just like past huge news crises have done, and it is not good. The Kennedy assassination seemed to usher in an era when the United States effectively left what was considered it’s “golden age,” a period when it was the envy of the entire world, when it far and away led the world in terms of influence politically, economically, militarily, and culturally. September 11th seemed to end the era of the United States being the still respected leading superpower of the world, as the wars under George W. Bush and the increasing surveillance and drone strike methods that Bush, Obama, and Trump all seemed to champion have undermined the credibility, trust, and still relative good standing with other countries that we used to have.
Now, the coronavirus is showing that the United States has outright glaring failures. In what way? Well, the White House “leadership” (yes, I put that word in quotes) would be laughable, if the consequences were not so damn tragic. Trump and many other Washington insiders were too busy trying to undermine or even outright deny the threat, that they squandered an opportunity at better preparedness for when Covid-19 finally did reach our shores. Despite Trump’s claims that he and his team are handling the crisis brilliantly, there is plenty of evidence to suggest quite the opposite, such as his earlier numerous denials, and how he seems far more concerned about the impact on the stock market than he is with the very real impact on the lives of the American people.
Beyond just the Trump administration, which has exacerbated the crisis rather than helping to make it a little better, the system of extreme capitalism has shown that it’s excesses are a clear sign that it is failing. People are not being tested in any great number, there are not enough masks to go around in hospitals, which are already overcrowded, with not only no relief in sight, but with things expected to grow even worse in the coming weeks and months. The callous indifference of so-called national “leaders” (again, the quotes) show blatant corruption and shameless self-interest, as politicians sold their valuable stocks just before the crash, all while misleading the public by claiming that this will not be that bad. The most infamous such case is Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina, who sold a reported $1.7 million worth of stocks, and told a private audience just how bad the coronavirus would probably get, while telling the general public that, for the most part, there was not much to worry about.
Nor is Senator Burr the only one who seems not overly worried about the detrimental impact of the spread of Covi-19. Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin took a philosophic approach, saying that only somewhere between1 percent to 3.4 percent of cases of coronavirus wind up leading to death. Even if the number of Americans who get infected remain well below half of the total population, or even if it remains less than a quarter of the population or even just ten percent who will get infected, that still means that tens of millions of Americans will get it, and out of those, hundreds of thousands, and possibly even millions, will die. Johnson was trying to remain upbeat about the prospects of only a few hundred thousand, or perhaps a million or more, victims of Covid-19. That kind of callous indifference from an American – particularly a Republican - politician and champion of the no holds barred version of capitalism that we have here in the United States is as American as apple pie. And again, I reiterate that the whole world is watching how we react, and we are losing still more ground in our credibility and basic human decency before the eyes of the entire world.
Many people are taking involuntary breaks from work, and many of those are not being paid. There were huge spikes in cases of people filing for unemployment. Some businesses are asking these people to take unpaid leave for many weeks. A lot of people are worried that they will not have a job to come back to, and for many of those people, losing their jobs also would mean losing their health insurance, since our “for profit” healthcare system binds health insurance to employment. That impending crisis in it’s own right comes just as the biggest health crisis in at least one century grows to a level that is impossible to ignore, much less deny. Many businesses are fearful that they will not be able to weather this storm.
Yes, it is bad.
But I do not want to fixate on all of the bad, or add to the fear, or even the paranoia, that seems to be growing at the moment, perhaps even faster than the coronavirus crisis itself is. That, to me, is part of the problem, and not a minor part.
This crisis is about a lot more than inconvenient shortages of toilet paper or meat or rice or other items at the supermarkets. There are a lot of jokes about those things, and I have joked about some of those things myself. The reality is, however, that this virus is far more serious than that. We are facing something that is far scarier or grimmer, frankly, than the planes that crashed into buildings on September 11th, or the bullets that struck a young president more than half a century ago. This crisis is very real, yet one of the major problems is that some people still are not taking it seriously. Just days ago, some people in Florida took advantage of their days off from work to go to beaches that ended up being very crowded, even though the whole idea of being taken out of work was to stay at home in an effort to contain the virus.
Sometimes, it feels like we Americans are just asking for something truly horrible to happen to us, because we keep collectively tempting fate. Does it still seem like a good idea to have put a clown into our highest office? I remember one Trump fan telling me that at the very least, he will be entertaining. While I personally never found the man entertaining in the least, I wonder if those people who voted for him because they agreed that Trump was entertaining (and I believe there are quite a few of those) are still laughing now, through his denials and his bungling of this whole crisis, or implying that sick (and potentially infectious) people should continue to go to work, and that they would likely get better? Are you not entertained?
Frankly, I wish that we had a real president at the helm, and not a transparently selfish, spoiled, disinterested parasite. I wish we had far better people in Washington right now more generally, people who might actually be seriously regarded as leaders.
Unfortunately, that is not the case. We have what is a reflection of the values that we have championed in this country for far too long: selfishness, indifference, xenophobia, ugly nationalism, arrogance mixed with ignorance, and sickening secrecy to keep the truth at bay. And the situation with the coronavirus is worse because of all of this. There are lessons to be learned from all of this, but will we actually take it seriously enough this time to learn from it? We did not learn all that much from September 11th, as we squandered the sympathy of the world by pursuing unethical and unjustifiable war in Iraq. We have not learned lessons apparently from four decades or more of an increasingly extremist capitalist ideology, even though our standard of living has consistently slipped. When we faced the economic crisis of 2008, we elected “leaders” who bailed out the big banks and major corporations, leaving middle of the road Americans out to dry.
Can we Americans finally overcome our own collective conceit to learn some serious lessons and humility from all of this?
As with our economy presently, I would not bank on it.
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