Every day 100 Americans are murdered and 200 wounded with firearms.  No  one hunts wildlife with an AR15 or 38 Special.  Assault weapons and pistols are intended and purchased for the sole purpose of killing human beings.  Okay?

From the Oval Office, in times of crisis American presidents address the people.  As COVID-19 races like a prairie fire and violence erupts in the streets, we yearn for information and assurance.

Transformative presidential addresses embody truth and hope.   Paradoxically, identifying, merely naming the problem, dragging it out of the closet, triggers feelings of relief.  Knowing and facing the issue head-on, our prospect of managing it enhance immeasurably.  The classic, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s inaugural address, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

Nine months into the COVID 19 pandemic, as America closes in on 150,000 dead and 3,000,000 cases, Donald Trump’s drumbeat the virus is “under control,” “not a problem,” will go away through a “miracle,” “with or without a vaccine,” fly in the face of reality.  In “A Few Good Men” Marine Colonel Nathan Jessup (Jack Nicholson) famously shouted, “You can’t handle the truth!”  President Trump can’t handle the truth of COVID 19 or most reality!

It’s there.  Read the numbers.  Study the graphs.  With five percent of the world’s population America has one quarter of its COVID 19 cases, more than all of Europe combined. States continue reporting record numbers of cases, hospitalizations and deaths, with PPE shortages and refrigerated vans reminiscent of New York City in April.  Social distancing safeguards, relaxed only weeks ago, are “rolled back.”  All thanks to a dangerously irrational, tragically incompetent President.

When Donald Trump opens his mouth things always go south.  Despite not having the Presidential platform, Joe Biden can and must make The Speech!

Kayleigh Mcenany, Kellyanne Conway, Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham:
What’s behind snarky, golden-haired, Preening Princesses of Privilege’s affinity for Conservatism?  Cozying-up to harry-chested farmers and truckdrivers, could it  be about  Daddy?

I quipped that Donald Trump gives ignorance a bad name. I should explain.

According to mirriam-webster.com, ignorance is a “lack of knowledge, education, awareness.” The transitive verb “ignore” implies refusal to “take notice of.”—Like I understand “transitive verbs,” right!

Ignorance is not necessarily a problem nor a disgrace. We are ignorant. Being expected to know everything would put each of us in a sorry state. In my view, however, much if not most human suffering has roots in ignorance.

Is the opposite of ignorance genius? Geniuses exhibit “a single strongly marked capacity or aptitude, extraordinary intellectual power especially as manifested in creative activity, a person endowed with extraordinary mental superiority.” Obvious geniuses exhibit superior insight and skill in mathematics, physics, philosophy, music, painting, sculpting, athletics, etc. Less notable geniuses may show extraordinary understanding and skill in teaching, auto mechanics, culinary art, carpentry, tailoring, piloting, entertaining, truck driving. Truck driving? Try maneuvering double-long eighteen wheelers down a ten-foot-wide lane, seventy miles an hour, in bumper-to-bumper traffic. If you get there, back ‘er into a loading dock.

Like “ignorance,” “genius,” may carry mistaken baggage.   Despite unique skill and brilliance, geniuses know they don’t know it all. I suspect most do not think of nor would they label themselves a “genius.”

Ironically, calling himself a “stable genius,” Donald Trump flaunts ignorance, giving it a bad rap. Again ironically, by elevating ignorance to an art form our President may exhibit a sort-of perverse genius!

The Really Big Question: Does Donald believe his rhetoric or lie? Either way we have a world-class tragedy rooted in the Oval Office.

“Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt.”

A. Lincoln

My hunch is, under cover of racial justice, attacks on American’s heritage, defacing and pulling down statues, smearing, distorting and erasing our history have the fingerprints of Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping all over them. Sadly, a handful of mindless thugs are happy to serve as handmaidens and hatchet-men. Tragically, Vlad or Xi versus Donald Trump is like Sven Øen Carlsen smiling across a chessboard at an autistic five-year-old—NOT in any way to depreciate autistic five-year-olds.

If we hang tough and dump Trump we can survive.

 

From Alan Piper, Senior Politics Producer, “NowThis”:

2014 Obama-Biden’s global health security unit established to: see, isolate, respond quickly, 69 page pandemic response playbook

2018 Trump fired global health security unit, declined to renew CDC epidemic
prevention funding

2019 intelligence official warning of COVID coming from china

Jan. 3 Whitehouse National Security Council briefed

Jan. Germany began working on a test

Jan. 8 CDC first warning

Jan. 9 WHO first warning

Jan. 10 WHO issued a comprehensive packet how to detect test and manage potential
cases

Jan. 18 HHS Sec. Alex Azar tried to have an urgent phone call about the crisis but was
cut off to berate him for his efforts to ban flavored vaping projects

Jan. 20 First confirmed case of COVID 19 in America and South Korea implemented
testing, 250 deaths, US 65,000

Jan. 22 We have it under control. It’s just one person coming in from China.

Jan. 23 Wuhan shut down, WHO international news conference, Sen. Minority Leader
Chuck Schumer called for a public health emergency

Jan. 24 Tweet China all will work out well

Jan. 27 Biden op-ed: Trump failing to take this crisis seriously and need to take more
immediate action

Jan. 28 Warren released her plan

Jan. 29 Trade advisor Peter Navaro urgent White House memo warning of the risk of
the virus, task force formed

Jan. 30 Wouhan locked down, WHO “global health emergency”

Feb. 2 Partial China travel restriction 39 countries, epidemiologist Dr. Jennifer Ruzzo: no evidence travel restrictions stopped or slowed transmission of the virus

Feb. 3, WHO strategic preparedness

Feb. 5, Azar requested $4 billion to fight the virus, lead to a shouting match in the W.H.

Feb. 6, WHO began distributing ¼ million tests around the world, U.S. didn’t want any, 90 CDC
faulty tests

Feb. 10, Trump proposed budget would cut CDC by 16% (Trump: virus will be gone by
April)

Feb. 19, 20, Trump rallies

Feb. 23, Peter Navarro sounded another WHO alarm increasing probability of a full-
blown COVID 19 pandemic

Feb. 24, Trump asks Congress for additional funding “CORONA virus very much under
control”

Feb. 26, “you treat this like a flu” “risk to the American people remains very low” 60
cases, not 15

Feb. 27, “will disappear like a miracle”

Feb. 28: Democrat’s “hoax”

Feb. 29, first confirmed U.S. death

Feb. 29 – March 6, Wash., Calif. Maryland, Kentucky & Utah states of emergency, CDC
“anyone that needs a test gets a test”

March 4, Fox interview: might be okay to go to work w/CORONA

March 7, N.Y. state of emergency

March 9, Trump compared CORONA virus to the flu

March 10, “It will go away on its own”

March 11, WHO not just a global health emergency but a pandemic, alarming levels or
spread and severity and “by the alarming levels of inaction”

March 13, Trump finally declares a national emergency

March 16, tells governors respirators, ventilators and equipment get it yourself

March 17, I always knew it was a pandemic, knew long before it was called a pandemic

March 26, US passed all other countries with 82,000 confirmed cases

May 15, Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany, White House Scrapped Obama/Biden
Playbook and drafted their own. We see how that worked out.

The latest: In a July 5 speech Trump reported that after three million COVID 19 tests, ninety-nine percent are “totally harmless.” The source of President’s statistic is unknown to and unsupported by scientific advisors. As always, it’s impossible to ferret out The Donald’s thinking. Does he mean to minimize America’s 130,000 deaths and current 3,000,000 plus 50,000 new cases a day—ten times the total for twenty-seven European Union member states?

Columbia University found that a February stay-at-home order would have precluded 83% of America’s COVID 19 cases. Data from the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation show that 90% of U.S. COVID 19 deaths would have been prevented if the president had issued physical distancing guidelines even two weeks earlier.

Failing to act early and decisively, the Trump’s administration’s triggered the deaths of tens-of-thousands and suffering of hundreds-of-thousands Americans. And, alarming and unfathomable as it is, Donald’s campaign boast that he could shoot a person on a New York street and not lose a single voter seems born out!

In great and tragic irony, Donald Trump’s COVID 19 response today recalls Winston Churchill’s Battle of Britain observation regarding the Royal Air Force, “Never have so many owed so much to so few.”

And he’s running for reelection!

Such a tiny mind.

For Christians it’s simple. Whatever you feel, think or do, continually ask, “What would Jesus feel, think or do?”

We yearn for,

• “These are the times try men’s souls” (T. Payne)
• “Human happiness and moral duty are inseparably connected.” (G. Washington)
• “We hold these truths to be self-evident . . .”
• “We the people of The United States of America . . .”
• “Four score and seven years ago . . .”
• “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.”
• “Ask what you can do for your country.”
• “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!’
• “I have a dream.”
• “There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America – there’s the United States of America.”

Now, choosing pebbles from a gravel pile,

• “Carry ‘em out on a stretcher”
• Mocked a handicapped man.
• “The beauty of me is I’m very rich.”
• “I just start kissing them. . . . Grab them by the pussy.”
• Haiti and African nations are “shithole” countries
• About rioters at the Charlottesville white supremacist and neo-Nazi “Unite the Right” rally, “You also had people there were very fine people, on both sides.”
• “Everybody loves me.”
• “I am a stable genius.”
• COVID 19 in America is “totally under control,” “going away,” “even without (a vaccine) it goes away”
• When Peter Alexander asked what Trump could say to Americans who are afraid, “I say you are a terrible reporter!”
• Bragging
• Mean
• Rude
• Insulting
• Name-calling

Like the murders of George Floyd and Rashard Brooks, seeing videos of George Washington’s, Thomas Jefferson’s and Ulysses S. Grant’s busts desecrated breaks my heart. And I’m not some chest-thumping, flag waving Neocon.   Like Will Rogers I don’t belong to an organized political party. I’m a Democrat.

I wonder about the character, wisdom and courage of citizens rioting in America’s streets. At Valley Forge the winter of 1777-1778, would today’s “patriots” have had the grit to hunker down alongside General Washington? Would they have exhibited equal zeal crossing the Delaware Christmas eve, knowing that by daybreak their shivering body might well be a frosted corpse?

Do the current protestors have the vaguest notion of the brilliance articulated by Thomas Jefferson in The Declaration of Independence? Do they understand, much less appreciate, the slave-owning Founding Fathers’ courage, work and sacrifices in drafting the very document which guarantees a mob of thugs’ rights peacefully to protest, liberty and happiness, The Constitution of the United States of America?

Spray-painting and toppling a bust of General and President Ulysses S. Grant is a monument to these vandals’ ignorance. Born into a staunchly abolitionist family, Ulysses father-in-law gave him a slave whom he freed. Grant then went on to lead President Lincoln’s Union army to victory over the Confederacy, ending slavery in America. From Shilo to Vicksburg to The Wilderness to dozens more scenes of carnage, would today’s rioters have soldiered on beside General Grant? Amid the smoke and chaos, stumbling over decapitated, eviscerated corpses of men beside whom they consumed biscuits and gravy hours before, would they have pressed on—or deserted?   As President, Grant was tireless in Reconstructing the South, prosecuting the KKK and appointing African and Jewish Americans to federal positions.

But, what about the acceptance of slavery in early America? Despite billions of dollars wasted and millions of lives lost, we accept the free and open use of alcohol, cigarettes and firearms.   Despite what may or may or may not have been seen as barbaric, for millennia before Washington and Jefferson’s time, worldwide trafficking in and owning human beings was commonplace.

Hindsight judges the past by contemporary norms. Suddenly teleported back to two-and-a-half centuries, who of us would possess the prescience, character and courage to speak out against slavery? Conversely, catapulted a hundred years forward, would we not decry the consequences of today’s additions to alcohol, marijuana and tobacco. Would we not riot over the global impact of America’s inexcusable, irresponsible burning of fossil fuels, our mindless polluting of Earth’s atmosphere, our fouling the oceans, our addiction to ever-lasting plastics, our exploiting species to extinction? Transported to the future, would we not stand aghast at America’s surrender to the Arms Industry? In hindsight, would we not view our current endemic violence, our abandonment of the World Health Organization, our failure to ratify the Kyoto Protocols, our continuing to pump thousands of tons of toxins into the atmosphere exacerbating global warming, as inexcusable? Looking back, who’s statues might we spray-paint and pull down?

In The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness Erich Fromm argues man needs to “make a dent.” If nowhere else, often “in someone’s head. “ Today’s vandals dent the heads of men whose dents make their mindless actions protected. “Protestors” smash the windows and loot the businesses of the very folks’ rights they purport to defend, the people whose persecution they decry. In quieter times, these are the faceless vandals who scrawl obscenities on public restroom walls, break mirrors and stuff paper rolls in toilets.

The great irony of today’s tragedy is that given the vagaries of chance and whims of British Monarchs, without the work, bravery and sacrifice of slave-owning George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and the Founding Fathers, neither their busts, the desecrators, nor the rest of us would exist!

The current protests and riots in America are not what they seem. George Floyd’s and Rashard Brooks’s murders, Black Live Matter, Washington, Jefferson and the Founding Fathers being slave owners merely opens a door for the powerless to act out against the system. Topple a stature, smash a window, torch a car, grab a flat-screen TV, when we’re swept up in pain motives and consequence don’t matter.