Reckoning

THE TERM "RECKONING" has been bandied about quite a bit lately. There appears to be an emerging consensus that the Covid 19 pandemic is some sort of reckoning. Wasn't that the title of a Steven King novel? Well..anyhow... a reckoning, if I'm not mistaken, occurs when all the cards are laid out on the table, face up, when the truth comes out, when certain truths become so blatantly exposed and made obvious by circumstances after having been long concealed, that people and society in general are forced to acknowledge reality, forced to confront and deal with it. Goethe said that we resist the truth only because we fear that we would perish if we accepted it. President Trump, for example, seems to be finally coming to terns, under great pressure, with the reality of the catastrophic epidemic ravaging the United States. No longer is he calling it a hoax, no longer does he claim that it will voluntarily vanish, although he still makes vague references to that misguided belief, and he has even been sighted masking his face, upon occasion. Perhaps, in future years when winter ceases to exist, he will have a personal reckoning with regard to climate change, and will stop calling it a liberal and chines hoax,but that is another mater, and he may not live to be so open minded. Will the thirty nine percent of Americans who still support the criminally incompetent Trump ever acknowledge his traitorous behavior and criminality and dishonesty? probably not. Some people defer their personal reckonings indefinitely. for them, Trump's detractors and accusers will forever be a conspiracy of the non existent deep state, the liberal media, the Chinese, the Democrats, and heaven knows who else. Partly because of George Floyd, the American people are coming to terms with  the race based inequalities of American society, the inadequacies of the American health care system, and of America's economic system, now proven to be so terribly fragile. The next great reckoning may be a political one, when the American people are somehow forced to confront the truth that corruption, greed, dishonesty, and hatred are not evenly distributed throughout the political spectrum,and that the vast majority of it is concentrated on the far right, and is firmly ensconced within the conservative
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