I am horrified.
I am appalled.
I am disgusted.
I am outraged.
I am infuriated.
Because I loathe politics and politicians so much, I try to obtain my national news in miniscule doses lest my blood pressure soars above the dangerous level. I look upon the “leaders” of our country as little girls and boys playing in big sandboxes called the Senate and the House of Representatives. They all are supposed to be charged with making the United States run like a well-oiled machine, but they all are so self-absorbed in perpetuating their own individual interests that it takes forever for them to reach an agreement about anything, if indeed they do.
Just watch how they don’t work together. If the Senate introduces a bill and sends it to the House’s sandbox for approval, the members of the House argue amongst themselves about it for awhile before finally making revisions and sending it back to the Senate’s sandbox. Now the members of the Senate fight about, and they may even threaten to take their buckets and shovels and go home if they don’t get their way. And so it goes with your government at work.
Then there’s the dog and pony show at the White House, but that’s another matter for a different day. At least the Republican National Carnival (sorry, I mean Convention) is over now after following on the heels of the Democratic National Carnival (sorry, I mean Convention), so now the media can get back to covering the pandemic and police using human beings for target practice. But forgive me for digressing from what precipitated this rant.
Political Coverage
The source of my outrage is a headline that appeared in The Hill, a publication devoted to covering politics and other news from Capitol Hill and the White House. I usually don’t pay any attention to it, but when I was surfing the Internet last week, a headline on that publication hit me so hard that I stared at it in disbelief. But there it was: 57 percent of Republicans say coronavirus death toll is ‘acceptable’
At the time this story in The Hill was published, the virus had killed more than 175,000 Americans, and at this writing that death total had increased to 185,821. The lead for the story faithfully corroborated the headline: “A majority of Republicans said that the number of coronavirus deaths in the U.S. — now topping 176,000, according to data from Johns Hopkins University — is ‘acceptable,’ according to a poll released Sunday.”
Ever since March the coronavirus has been wreaking havoc on the United States and many other countries around the world. Unfortunately (maybe the Republicans would disagree) the United States leads the world in cases with a staggering 6,092,969, followed by Brazil with 3,812,605. If you examine the statistics for all the countries in the world, you will find some of them where the death rate is very low. For example, Fiji has two deaths from 28 cases so far, and Aruba has nine from 1,906.
Now here’s my question. Do Fiji and Aruba consider two and nine deaths respectively acceptable? I would hope not. I would like to think that no deaths from the virus are acceptable. When the pandemic first hit, remember how Trump said the United States had everything under control? And when a reporter recently pointed out that more than 1,000 Americans are dying every day, Trump simply replied, “It is what it is.” So apparently a death toll of more than 185,000 is still acceptable.
What’s Acceptable?
When you stop and think of the mass carnage the virus has created worldwide, it should take your breath away. And yet we have the Republicans, probably sitting in their plush offices in Washington, D.C., who take time out from squabbling with each other to participate in a poll showing that 57 percent of them think a death toll of more than 175,000 is “acceptable.”
Who in the hell are these people running our country? A story like the one cited in The Hill is absolutely shameful. We are living in the middle of a nightmare, and it doesn’t look as if we are going to awaken anytime soon. But if and when we do wake up, wouldn’t it be nice to be in a world where human lives are respected and where even one COVID-19 death is completely UNACCEPTABLE.
