Time to Ignore Trump
We don’t need a clown and a peanut gallery in a pandemic
by Mike Meyer ~ Honolulu ~ May 12, 2020
It makes little sense to rant about the ongoing failures in the accelerating collapse of the US federal government. We are being overwhelmed by natural disasters, but people are amazingly resilient. The focus that I see among those responding to my efforts to understand this complexity is consistent and stoic.
Stoic is not a word I would have ever used to describe American culture, but it is a thing now. Facing social insanity and mentally dysfunctional national leadership on daily display is depressing as hell. But I see people getting stronger while standing for rationality, science, and reasonableness. That is a sign of cultural maturity that long-delayed in the US.
But an occasional rant helps relieve the frustration and anger against those who have willfully created these disasters. COVID-19 pandemic is a brutal lesson. There is hope it may eliminate much of what is considered politics in the post-modern world. But that can only happen with a complete takeover of government by the people and not some elite group or, worse yet, a poorly educated minority feeding on hatred.
Whether we can get there is an excellent question. Nature is not making it easy. We are past the simple times of dealing with one or two regional disasters and then moving on. Pandemics, drought, famine, mega-storms, and the unstoppable (at this point) progression of heat and mass extinctions are not separate but a combined assault on our dominance of this planet.
I think a majority of the population understands, at least, the broad strokes of this. The substantial agreement, above 70%, that opening the country requires that we have control of the SARS CoV-2 virus makes this clear. Gaining this control will be a long hard fight, and we have barely begun. Yet, we have a political group that is demanding the sacrifice of tens, even hundreds of thousands of, mostly low wage workers, for their benefit.
I don’t think we have time or energy to put up with more bullshit displays. We have lost our national government, now in the hands of incompetent idiots. We are learning stoicism in the face of the criminal failure of the people we pay to take care of our health and interests. That is hard. Our future is grim and, yet, we need to put up with the imbecile Trump and his stooges who make no effort to be rational.
A new level was reached on Monday when Trump gave a press conference to spread another absurd round of lies to distract from his administration’s abject failures. The US is still critically short of COVID-19 tests and has done only a small percentage of the population. China is now going to test all 11 million people in Wuhan because of a new round of infections. That is what is required.
That wasn’t Trump’s message, but his lies are old now and little interest. But the younger journalists stuck with covering these pointless press conferences are finished with putting up with his shit. That is the strength that is growing in America. Call the idiot out.
We all know what happened as Trump went off in a childish snit when he could not answer any question given to him. But, again, why do we have to put up with this now? We need to shut Trump and his peanut gallery down.
There is enough to do, and there are growing positive attitudes among the population that the hardship is worth it, and we can learn to live in a pandemic world. It is hard, and the past is a painful memory of what once was, but it will not be again — time to move on.
