“When Will We Ever Learn?”

Answering the Kennedys’ Call

@TBPInvictus

Pete Seeger first wrote his ode to ending wars, Where Have All the Flowers Gone? in 1955 but it could just as well apply to today’s war against the novel coronavirus pandemic that is killing more Americans than all the wars since World War II. It ends with the stanza:

Where have all the graveyards gone?
Covered with flowers every one
When will we ever learn?
When will we ever learn?

Yet one political party has chosen to surrender to the pandemic, rather than follow the scientific guidelines of the CDC, WIH, and FDA in many of the red states it controls.

Thirty-eight U.S. states have seen a rise in cases in the last 14 days, says MarketWatch’s Jeffrey Bartash. Harvard Global Health Institute researchers have developed a national tracker to trace the severity of the outbreak on a state-by-state basis, and it’s flashing red for red states like Arizona, Florida, Louisiana, South Carolina and Georgia with 25 cases per 100,000 people.

Republicans are also ignoring the rising death toll by holding political rallies without mandating the mask and social-distancing requirements in the face of today’s 63,500 plus coronavirus infections per day in the US and still rising.

President Trump was going to hold a rally in Portsmouth, New Hampshire that is now postponed, in spite of the objections of its Police Commissioner, Stefany Shaheen, who has called such a rally without requiring mask-wearing and social-distancing the waging of “biological warfare” against vulnerable New Hampshire residents—and even the diehard out of state Trump supporter’s already arriving in New Hampshire that has one of the lowest infection rates in the US.

This is after Trump held a rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma that Tulsa’s Medical Director said caused an outbreak of COVID-19 infections. “The president lives in a biological bunker,” said Shaheen. “He gets tested all of the time and yet the people attending this rally are not. They’re not getting daily testing. They don’t know if the person next to them without a mask has COVID-19. It is unacceptable and it’s dangerous.”

There is no rational or moral reason to hold any large gatherings at this time when all the health agencies say many states and counties should in fact close down again, since the pandemic is now racing out of control.

Even Dr. Anthony Fauci is now warning about the consequences of such ignorance. “When you don’t have unanimity in an approach to something, you’re not as effective in how you handle it,” he said in an interview Thursday with FiveThirtyEight’s PODCAST-19, as quoted by Bartash. “So I think you’d have to make the assumption that, if there wasn’t such divisiveness, that we would have a more coordinated approach.”

 The U.S. death toll stands at 133,291. Brazil is second to the U.S. with 1.76 million cases and 69,184 deaths. India is third measured by cases at 793,802, followed by Russia with 712,863 and Peru with 316,448.

Why are Republicans making such a cold and really very stupid political calculation while President Trump’s ratings continue to fall? Why won’t they learn the lessons this pandemic is showing them?
Perhaps it’s because the credo of self-reliance is no more than a myth propagated by those who refuse to share their wealth.

Mother Nature’s latest pandemic will win in any encounter with the followers of an ideology choosing to ignore safety measures in the name of self-reliance, as I said yesterday, rather than a “unanimity of approach.”

What mother doesn’t rely on the shared generosity of others to raise their children?

Harlan Green © 2020

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen