Changing Plans

 WHEN NAPOLEON INVADED RUSSIA IN 1812 with half a million men, he wanted to travel light, to be able to move quickly and strike quickly. his army traveled therefore with a minimum of food, water, clothing, and shelter, and medical supplies. The plan was to live, like the two protagonists in "of Mice and Men" :off the fat of the land". It didn't work. the plan backfired. It failed miserably. The retreating Russians scorched the Earth. They burned their crops and forests, killed their livestock, destroyed all their material wealth, ransacked and burned their own cities before giving them up to the overwhelming French force. The French army got weak and hungry, drank from polluted rivers, and got dysentery and typhus. Of the four hundred and eighty thousand soldiers who died, most died not from combat but from disease.They retreated from Moscow, which had been burned and abandoned when they arrived, and staggered back to France during a harsh winter. Only twenty thousand of them made it back alive. The entire time Napoleon dismissed all the disease as imaginary, trivial, and easily surmountable problem. He abandoned his ragtag remnant of an army, fled back to France in a fancy sleigh, and was removed from office, so to speak. Ten scored and eight years later, the United States of Amnesia was invaded by a deadly microscopic army,, a deadly enemy which its leader first called a "hoax", then dismissed as trivial, then, an a pathetic, ignorant attempt to show concern and competence, prescribed a series of incredibly crazy cures, like bleach,  then blamed the whole thing on a foreign country. he too was later removed from office. The invading virus was far more intelligently and properly prepared than napoleon's ill fated army. It will be driven out, but only after inflicting horrible damage, and, in effect, winning the war. The Russians' defense against the invading French was brilliant, and although involved great sacrifice, brilliantly effective. The American defense against the virus, by contrasts, was chaotic, weak, underfunded, and even included the bizarre and traitorous phenomenon of the president and a substantial portion of his loyal followers denying its existence and actually assisting its spread. This time, it was the invading army which used smart tactics, and the invaded country which blundered badly in its own defense, killing many of its people needlessly. Legendary football coach Mike Ditka once said that it is all well and good to have a grand plan, but that you had better be prepared to change it, when necessary. Napoleon should have sent man en back to France to obtain the necessary supplies, even belatedly, even when halfway through Russia. Trump should have stopped calling the pandemic a "hoax", and should have led in organizing a massive federal response in the spring, including contact tracing and testing. He should have admonished us constantly to wear a face mask, and he never should have had those idiotic MAGA disease spreading rallies. His mindless supporters should have changed their minds about Covid 19, and begun taking it seriously, which, it seems, they have yet to do. For the believers in hell hell exists only within the limits of their own hatred and fear, and for the rest of us, for the non believers, may the dear lord bless and keep us.