Getting Impatient

IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMNESIA, folks are becoming antsy. Tired of being told what to do, bored to be at home with nothing to entertain them except five hundred television channels on a high def big screen and the internet on every room, tired of having only a smart phone and several radios available, they simply cannot stand it any longer, and are beginning to defy reality, government restrictions, and common sense in their apparent urge to spread the epidemic far and wide while having a little fun at the beach in so doing. During the 1918 American flu pandemic, people got tired of staying at home, and since everyone seemed to be getting the flu no matter what, folks said to heck with it, got back out on the town, and the second and third waves hit, killing millions more people, all because of a lack of patience and respect for the health and well being of others. A lack of understanding of the microbiological world doubtless also contributed to the reckless behavior. History never, ever repeats itself, but it rhymes so closely as to seem eerily familiar. We the American people are simply too spoiled by our material wealth, and too arrogant by virtue of living in the land of exceptionalism, to obey any directive from any source which inconveniences us of impedes upon our ability to gain instant gratification. The mobs of protesters, who are really far fewer in number than their conservative media sponsors would have us believe, are so confident of their ability to resist infection by a ubiquitous virus that they for the most part don't even bother to wear masks, which they perhaps perceive will limit their ability to accurately aim their automatic rifles at people who disagree with their twisted thinking. They are the right wing loonies, wanting to get the economy going full bore by ignoring reality, and pretending that a second wave of viral infections is impossible, maybe because of their devotion to their Christian faith, which shields them from all harm. If America's conservative evangelical community is sufficiently insane to elect Donald Trump and to insist that he is a man of virtue and a great president three years later - and it is - it is sufficiently insane to believe that now is the time to stop fearing an epidemic, an epidemic that is taking a trifling seventeen hundred lives every day in the United States. The greatest threat to human civilization is neither climate change nor Covid 19, although both are deadly threats, but rather modern American evangelical conservatism.