These irrelevant little missives I’m creating are becoming harder and harder to write each day. Though they seem pretty dark, I admit, they are the product of a great deal of restraint. They aren’t nearly as dark as what I’m feeling.
We’re losing this battle.
Cheer the heroes. Look for the helpers as Mr. Rogers said, and there is no shortage of them. First responders, hospital personnel, CEO’s with the foresight to close their doors, Deep State supermen and women, all of who are committed to others at their own risk.
Millions of them.
They are trying to sop the ocean with a sponge.
A critical care physician of many years was being interviewed at the hospital he worked at in Italy. He said he was used to people being at that crossroads where their living or dying was strictly in his hands. He said the pressure was great but he always felt that he would make the difference. “This time I don’t think we are going to be enough.”
We are two weeks behind them, and we gave the virus a two month head start. Our spike is just beginning and already we are out of masks, swabs. We have never done comprehensive testing. We have not stayed home. We have not isolated. Our level of severity is easily predictable and inflicted from within.
We are seeing leaders, too. Governors, mayors that are rising up and taking control of the situation for the areas they can impact. But where it was really needed it was missing entirely. Trump’s incapacity to handle the burden of his job has been clearly revealed to all, and it is disastrous and tragic. We aren’t flattening the curve because people think he’s the guy to listen to, and he isn’t.
He really isn’t. The press is not the enemy and there is no new magic cure, even if the President “…feel(s) good about it”. Dr. Fauci corrected him in real time as he took the podium in today’s presser. Repeatedly, in fact. He is a hero, undoubtedly soon to be a martyr. I will remember him fondly. How he tried, how he tried.
I am isolating right now. My job has made my available time off greater and more accessible, and for that I am grateful. The irony to it is that after I avoid this exponential growth stage that we are currently just beginning, I will walk out into the peak, the place Italy finds itself right now. It’s all jousting with windmills, and though it will be just as futile, it will be just as noble. In the fight is the glory!
Or so I have read.
I’m not a hero. I’m a guy who’s aging and had a heart attack and I’m scared. Slowly people are starting to see what I have known for some time and been talking about here. Slowly they are seeing that nothing is going to stop this now, because we waited too long. The race is already won, and we are going to come in second. It would have been a great time to demonstrate that winning we had been promised, but that was not to be. Truth be told, it never was.
We lost the battle to the novel coronavirus in 2016. Because of the incompetent bully in the White House, people still aren’t isolating. People are still going to work, still interacting socially because they are following the lead of the President. If the call goes out to treat this as the emergency it is, he mitigates the message. He thinks his job is to maintain an unrealistic hope that this is just fake news, a non-event. Millions of masks are on the way, no problem! No one knows where they are coming from. We have plenty of respirators! No we don’t. He believes that he has to minimize this disaster in order to win in the fall, and his attempts to minimize the severity of what we are facing will kill people.
It may kill me.
Do what you can. Take it seriously. Protect yourself any way you can, because right now you are on your own. The cavalry isn’t coming. Custer is leading the charge, and that has never worked out well.