There is Nothing Left of Our Past to Protect
First, we must protect our lives and then build a new future.
by Mike Meyer ~ Honolulu ~ April 17, 2020
Wellbeing and security in a state are no longer possible when people driven by ignorance, fear, and hatred can paralyze that state at the whim of the power-hungry rich. Watching this in the US during a rising planetary pandemic is almost impossible to believe.
The continuously disgusting displays put on by Donald Trump, protected by his enablers, have moved beyond disastrous to criminal at a species level. The population of this planet has watched three years of rapid decline in the once lead nation of the 20th century. The arrival of the Copid-19 pandemic has buried the last remnants of the 18th century’s Great Experiment, and the greedy elite is now pounding down the dirt on the grave.
That the people paid to pretend outrage at critical health and pandemic protection on the behest of their manipulators will suffer the highest death rates from their actions is no solace to the majority: we all risk suffering and death with them.
Understanding this is adding profound fear to our struggle to adapt to our new pandemic world. The rise of late-stage capitalist fascism in a new form has depressed all of us as this political collapse has accelerated. That this has grabbed control of second or third-tier states along with the US makes it a civilizational disease. We are facing not only the worst of SARS-CoV2 type pandemics but and an older and equally deadly cultural illness.
The people that succumb to this cultural disease become socially psychotic, and we know where it leads. Like juvenile gangs, they understand only brutality and death and have no control over their impulsivity. They come to define themselves by hatred and the need to prove that hatred or lose their place in the only social group they have.
That we have a pathological narcissist as the figurehead, whose mental condition shows growing irrationality is a catalyst for this explosive mixture. You do not disarm a bomb by discussion or vote. There are no two sides to this issue, but only the choice of death over the life of a civilization.
The realization that we face a severe political disease, specifically in the US, has been evident since 2016. Still, the massive inertia of a once great and prosperous, two-hundred forty-year-old nation, blocked any public acknowledgment. As the pandemic has suddenly destroyed the old economy and the forces of fascist evil are actively pushing the death of millions to salvage their power, there is nothing left of that, now, the ancient world to protect.
Forcing open society against all scientific knowledge will only spike the death rate through the summer. Hundreds of thousands will die in the US and millions around the planet. For what? Grossly distorted fortunes and mindlessly wielded power, resurgent racism, and ethnocentrism? Destruction of our world and its atmosphere as a goal?
The shouting for the deadly restoration of the capitalist economy makes no mention of the climate disaster that has only temporarily been overshadowed by a pandemic. We know the growing carbon output will destroy our planetary civilization if not controlled, and the sudden halt to production and carbon emissions has shown us what the future could be. But that is to be denied. Our tradition is pollution, greed, mass suffering, and death, while billionaires party in sealed communities.
That their ignorance prevents them from seeing the stupidity of their vision is no help. That the wealth will die, too, is no solution. These billionaires have the vast wealth to play whatever games they wish. The astroturfing of pandemic controls directly funded by people such as DeVos and their pseudo-religionist ilk cheered on by their demented figurehead is a crime that we can no longer allow.
We are past the time that vaguely critical hand wringing is the only ‘legitimate’ response. The desperate grasping at a November election led by a slightly less insane member of the old elite was dependent on a temporary return to normalcy to allow ‘reforms’ and ‘restoration.’ The SARS CoV2 pandemic has already obliterated any hope of that normalcy.
Our tentative lifeline to the past disintegrated over the last two months of untreatable deaths. And those deaths have not yet peaked in many nations and states. There is no quick end or solution but only hard and committed work as we learn to deal with fear, disruption, and poverty amid vast wealth for a tiny minority.
These crimes are no longer acceptable on our threatened planet. This shit must stop, and we must stop it now.
