So what’ll it be, America?
Let’s start the bidding shall we: 77,000? 160,000? 200,000? 300,000?
Do I hear 500,000?
One million dead people?
How about ten million dead people from the racist man with the orange face over there?
You know, the orange man who said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and still not lose supporters?
Sold!
One of the numbers above could be the actual number of people who have died from COVID-19 in the United States Of America. Right now. In 2020.
What will it take for you to be uncomfortable? What will it take for you to say, enough is enough?
We have already slipped into dreaded numbness of numbers. Numbers of bodies. Numbness of bodies. Numbness of people. Numbness of life.
Numbness has left us cold in America.
And this happened at least 244 years ago.
Way before that, actually.
We have collectively been held in thrall of a death cult.
And this didn’t start with Donald Trump.
He is the illogical or logical manifestation and embodiment of it.
Death cults have been in America with the enslavement of Black people, with the genocide of Native Americans, with the dropping of nuclear bombs on the Japanese in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The daily cults that clamored around mutilated, castrated, dangling, burnt Black bodies with excited white people gleeful and awe-stricken.
It was, and is a family affair. Don’t you know? Just ask the McMichaels.
We are old, sick pros at this. At least some of us are.
Politicians in the US talking about dying for the economy was taken as an absurd, cruel joke just three weeks or so ago when Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick said this psychopathic madness on Fox News no less.
Now this talking point from Mr. Patrick is literally what at least 44 states in these deeply twisted and troubled United States-in-crisis will implement as their mantra as they will all reopen by the end of this weekend. They will all open without even the minimum Centers For Disease Control guidelines for 14 straight days of declines in coronavirus deaths and cases being met by ANY state.
And no serious testing, tracing or isolation or physical distancing.
Only in America.
Brooks & Dunn called: they want their song back.
They don’t want their song to be associated with America’s love of death.
The deaths from coronavirus continue to rise.
And a vast minority of people in the US want to go back to work amidst a rising tide of death as the coronavirus keeps spreading and killing.
Profits over people.
Herd immunity.
These are the calculations Donald Trump (who knew about this coronavirus as far back as at least last November) and other callous money-first multi-billion-dollar business leaders have made. (Trump has alluded to herd immunity on numerous occasions this year, one occasion of which was reported in The Washington Post.)
By the way, here is a four-point Cliff Notes edition of Trump, Republicans and multi-billionaire leaders’ ideology:
Out with the old, in with the young, most promising and longevity-favored.
Out with the Black people who are losing their lives to COVID-19 in record, disproportionate numbers.
Out with the Brown people who are afflicted with COVID-19 and are in detention centers, concentration camps in the U.S.
Out with the infirm and those with disabilities.
On this VE Day, is there a person that those last four refrains and mentalities evoke?
This psychopathic, sociopathic loving of death also applies to Gregory McMichael and Travis McMichael, finally arrested yesterday after more than two months of living life high off the dead body of Ahmaud Arbery, his video-recorded execution by the McMichaels, a father-and-son tag-team of death, passed around like a new, dangerous, sick fetish or virus.
Meanwhile, the killing of Black people continues.
Did I mention Calvin Munerlyn?
Or Douglas Lewis?
Or Sean Reed?
Last time I checked, Black Lives Matter(ed).
They still do.
They always will.
Black lives will always be on the line because of institutionalized and systemic racism, four words that few on 24-hour cable news television are willing to say, even while we and they are engulfed by the obvious. Black lives have become invisible in America. Black deaths have become very visible at the same time.
To that end, as the disproportionate rates of death increase among Black people (at least 60 percent of those dying now in densely populated areas in the U.S. are Black people), the National Football League, whose white owners treat its Black players with contempt–how dare you silently protest police murdering Black people!–published its 2020 regular season schedule yesterday.
Rah rah! Go team! We’re number one!
Happy days.
As the Death Cult rages amongst the violent, racist and misogynist white demonstrators parading around with guns in broad daylight in the same open carry states where unarmed Black people are routinely attacked and killed by police, Donald Trump isn’t losing any sleep. Not a wink.
Trump doesn’t want any more tests of people for coronavirus.
Trump isn’t worried about the amount of lives lost.
Too lazy, afraid and cowardly to wear a mask as even the most symbolic of sacrifices, Donald Trump has been busier telling people how to end their own lives than he has playing golf.
Lately.
Captain Lysol aka Trump, has been telling you to inject disinfectant into yourself.
He has been telling you to take hydroxychloroquine a drug that causes cardiac arrests and death.
And many people in America (including in New York, Kansas, Arizona and Maryland) have followed Trump and his stable genius advice like Jim Jones.
To their deaths.
They died taking his advice based on his hunches and feelings.
Donald Trump isn’t worried about the deaths of Americans.
Trump says the word “death” often as if it is a punchline, turn-on or fantasy.
One of his good friends died from COVID-19 and Trump was publicly nonchalant about it.
In his 2017 inauguration speech when Trump said that “American carnage ends right here” and it “ends right now” he meant exactly the opposite.
Trump derides nurses who are dying on the frontlines to save lives. He implicitly accused frontline workers of stealing masks. He refused to give New York state the 40,000 or 30,000 ventilators governor Andrew Cuomo was calling (or is that begging?) for.
“The federal government isn’t a shipping clerk, Trump said last month.
What Donald Trump does care about, aside from himself, is money and the economy. And the loss of over 20 million jobs in April in the U.S. alone really has Trump running scared as November 3 awaits.
We need a culture of pro-life in America — meaning a culture that respects the rights of people to have a living wage, to have an education, to have free healthcare, to have food on the table, to breathe clean air, to have a roof over their heads.
But for now? The Death Cult rolls on.
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