A Perfect Storm
An incompetent, impotent, impeached and authoritarian POTUS emboldened by a complicit senate and party, a global pandemic and accompanying unemployment and deprivation, acts of vicious and gratuitous violence by the public and the police against the oppressed, and large masses of people protesting and letting loose all their frustrations and agony.
A vicious circle of great suffering.
A tormented people must protest peacefully, and sometimes not so peacefully. An incompetent narcissist must subdue the people, for he loves his own voice, and that must, in his ill-formed mind, “dominate.” Violence perpetuates violence and more protest gatherings. The Covid-19 pandemic feeds on such gatherings… hence, more suffering, death, and torment.
And what are the leaders of the States of these United States to do? Curfews? New lockdowns? Or just watch rising infection numbers? See how Arizona is doing:
[image error]New Cases of Covid-19 infections in AZ (the y-axis clips the June 2 number, 1127, at 800)
The last week of May in the graphic above reflects an ill-advised reopening of AZ, my state, towards the middle of the month. The day before June 2nd saw 1,127 cases: a number so large the graphic is unable to display it.
But why is this a perfect storm? Why am I so pessimistic, when everyone’s looking for better news? A curse of a truthsayer; one who wishes, with all his heart, to be a soothsayer.
I wish I could make even the feeblest of attempts to say it’ll be alright, everything will turn out for the best in the end. But this is the beginning; we are nowhere near the unknown termination of this prolonged period of agony. Our tribulations stem from incompetence and unmitigated arrogance: the current administration undid every sensible step the previous administration took toward a more peaceful America and world. They tore up the pandemic playbook prepared. Disbanded the global pandemic office that may have acted proactively to keep America safe. The head of government downplayed the pandemic for the longest period he could – presumably because of the election year. America was caught unprepared and leaderless in a once-a-century event; more than 100,000 citizens are dead in 3 months, the economy is in shambles, and instead of reopening gradually, safely, as many other nations have done, we have disregarded many recommendations of the experts in reopening state economies without meeting necessary preconditions for doing so. And, rather than advocating caution, the ignorant head of the administration has been further dividing opinion in the nation and demanding that large religious gatherings be allowed again. He wanted the “Churches filled for Easter.”
So… no, I cannot say that everything will be alright. Nothing is!
In the midst of the pandemic, we saw, in the space of about a week, vicious acts of racial violence against black Americans. A white woman in Central Park, New York City, demonstrated, for all America to see, how she could willfully threaten the life of an African-American by calling cops and filing a false complaint against him. Three white men pursued a jogging Ahmaud Arbery, a young black man, cornered him with their vehicles, and shot him dead. All this upon the excuse that they were executing a citizen’s arrest on a suspected burglar. Cops in the State of Georgia did not arrest them (for two months!) until public outrage reached a crescendo. Cops arrested an unarmed George Floyd, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and choked the life out of him kneeling on his neck, after handcuffing him, for almost 9 minutes, 3 minutes of which were after he stopped pleading for breath, for life, and had become unresponsive. This too was recorded for all America to see; bystanders who begged to help Floyd were prevented from doing so by cops. Police brutality, a veritable lynching, of the kind seen only during Ku Klux Klan days, was on display in the present for all America to know.
Goaded on by a cowardly bully, who hides behind armies of lawyers and sycophants, cops shoot and harm journalists as they cover protests. More than 100 incidents of police violence upon the press have been recorded in just the past week.
What can the people, exhausted and frightened by the pandemic, sick and tired of a racist and narcissist in office, do when these see such outrages? What can we expect of anyone in such circumstances? What do you think will happen when a pandemic, systemic racism, and rampant police brutality ravage the people while a pretender eggs his base and radical fringes on with calls for violence and “domination?”
A revolution, no less, but an agonizing one.
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