Even though, thank heavens, it looks more and more likely that Donald Trump will be escorted from the White House in the next couple of weeks, the unspeakable horrors his tenure there has inflicted on us all is just now unleashing its worst. After almost a year, the Covid-19 pandemic is now bursting the nation’s capacity to provide basic treatment, and battlefield “triage” decisions about who, waiting in overcrowded hospital corridors, will live and who will die is going to become an ugly part of our culture.
According to our best healthcare sources here, the next two weeks are going to be the worst for the spread, the illness and the death toll associated with this pandemic. After that, it is hoped that the countereffect of the vaccines being administered will begin to mitigate some of the worst. But the advice to our readers and anyone paying attention is to remain especially vigilant for the next period. Frankly, if you wear a mask in all public settings you should be OK. That’s not a promise, but if you don’t mask up with gusto you are definitely subjecting yourself to much higher risk scenarios.
But even so, in this most advanced, well-heeled nation on earth we are beginning to see decisions being made to deliberately withhold life-saving treatments to countless of our citizens simply because there is not enough to go around. Senior citizens who have contributed their entire lives to the vast resources this most powerful nation has accumulated are now listening to doctors and nurses telling them they can’t receive medical treatment for a life-threatening illness.
And while Trump golfs away his last days as president, taking no regard for the rising tide of pain and death being heaped upon us all, even more dreadful to fathom is that he will leave upon his departure a robust, living political movement attached to his madness, which will live on to plague and torment our society for years to come.
Is there a vaccine against this? Are we doomed to see the hard-fought freedoms and weal our best citizens have struggled to pass onto us for over 250 years now crumbling before our very eyes? Is democracy destined to fail? Are the hordes of hell going to overrun our institutions with their crazed racism and xenophobia?
The answer is not yet known. All we can promise is that there is a pressing need to fight, to win the ideological war in favor of democracy and universal human dignity against everything that has called Trump and Trumpism into being.
We have hope that love and compassion prevail over the frustration, nihilism and hate that have been encouraged in our culture the last half century. We must root out the nihilism and selfish self-centeredness of postmodern cynics who now permeate our films, our literature, our diet of TV drivel and that can invade our hearts, too.
