Imagine: If only we could understand
Published: 4/12/2020 6:15:04 AM
"As we pass through the seasons of Passover, Easter and Ramadan in silence, as Americans quietly confront global and domestic challenges to the belief that we’re the beacon of hope to the world, the unassailable champion of democracy, freedom and opportunity – as we witness an emergent spring bringing with it unimagined suffering and loss – we’re compelled to imagine an America we’ve not previously experienced.
We’re compelled to imagine an America that is being rent apart both by a deadly virus and by a corrupt administration more interested in securing its authority, privilege and power that in healing and calming a traumatized nation.
Recently, Jared Kushner patted himself, and his father-in-law, on the back by paraphrasing one of Donald Trump’s favorite tropes: “We’ve done things that the federal government has never done before, quicker than they’ve ever done it before.”
That, ironically, may be true. In fewer than four years an American president has – through a historically unmatched combination of ignorance, hubris and racism – expanded wealth inequity to previously unknown levels, put hundreds of thousands of Americans at death’s door, put millions in unemployment queues and food lines, marginalized minorities and communities of color and, joint by joint, chipped away at the mortar that for over 200 years has bound us as a democratic republic, a diverse peoples, as a nation of the people, for the people – where all are created equal.
Ironically, Kushner’s callous, self-congratulatory comment was delivered a day after President Trump informed the nation that perhaps between 100,000 to 240,000 Americans could soon die from the pandemic, a pandemic that is disproportionately killing Americans from within our most vulnerable and least served communities in America – communities of color.
Imagine – tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of dead Americans – brothers, sisters, strangers, sojourners, loved ones. While predictive models continue to be revised downward as new data is calculated, any level approaching such a scale is unacceptable.
Imagine considering that tens of thousands of Americans might die in this, the first iteration of a pandemic that may well persist beyond spring, a possibility that arises not as an act of God, not as a force majeure, not as a Black Swan event but out of malign ignorance and insatiable greed for power and profit.
That arises, in part, because America has permitted the empowerment of an intolerant, primarily anti-science, anti-facts, anti-Enlightenment, white nationalist movement that has attached itself to Donald Trump and the Republican Party in much the same way that ISIS and the Taliban have risen to power in the Middle East – through the corrupt alignment of fundamentalist religious and political interests in pursuit of power.
In 1945 Karl Popper wrote that: “Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.”
That remains true today. For nearly four years too many Americans have blindly tolerated the intolerant because they were promised the ineffable, a fulfillment of dreams that once believed were unrealizable – promised an America based on delusional beliefs that some peoples were more deserving and worthy than others.
And based on those delusions they tolerated the intolerable.
And this year, since January, Donald Trump and the Republicans – out of fear of losing their power and privilege in November, have weaponized their political interests rather than the interests of the nation.
Through their parochial prism – a prism where today only 40% of Americans have “a great deal of confidence” in the scientific community – the pandemic is a chimera, a hoax, a flu that warm weather would dissipate – not a health threat to the nation that threatened its social, economic and political interests.
“It’s going to disappear,” Trump said. “One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.”
It hasn’t disappeared and daily we’re forced to bear witness to what the lies, falsehoods, and manipulations – and, most grievously, lack of testing – have wrought.
Break:
His primary constituency is a politically malleable, mostly white, male, high-school-educated, base driven by resentments, prejudices and envy,
a constituency that harbors QAnon, anti-Semites
and Islamophobes in its midst, that believes, still, that Obama is
Muslim and non-American and that, according to
Franklin Graham, “God was behind the last election.”
moar:
https://www.concordmonitor.com/If-only-we-could-understand-33774810