He Is Not On Our Side

The craziest thing to me about our new reality is that with most trauma, you don’t see it coming. Childhood abuse is so out of bounds from what our little minds can process. A sudden death of a loved one becomes where the fuck did that come from? natural disasters or freak car crashes give our emotional states the same kind of whiplash type feeling.

With all of those examples, things happen. it takes a period of time for you to process it. you go through the stages of grief. There are people to help. People who have gone through it before. It feels good that you’re not alone. To recognize that it is possible to heal and move on.

We’ll all deal with trauma in different ways and at different paces, but life goes on, like it or not. And it does affect us even if we choose not to process it with the help of others.

So, I’m living with this idea of what things will be like for us in the US in six months. It’s haunting me. I had a nightmare last night that I was screaming at the top of my lungs about it, but no one was listening.

There’s a William S Burroughs line for this phenomenon, “I began to get a feeling from my bartending days of being the only sane man in a nut house. It doesn't make you feel superior but depressed and scared, because there is nobody you can contact.”

I think that’s an accurate description of where my head is when I stop to think about this pandemic. I’m depressed and scared. And have had to compartmentalize to go about my day. no one has gone through what we are about to as a nation.

Our president is not on our side. And that should scare the living hell out of all Americans.

It started two years ago when he disbanded our national pandemic response unit. The former director said their group was supposed to be like a smoke alarm. They’d make noise early on “all with the goal of avoiding a six alarm fire.”

Six isn’t enough for what we’re about to see. Today, the World Health Organization said that the US could become an epicenter for COVID 19. Well yeah duh.

It takes only the most basic common sense and simple math skills to see we have a problem that we aren’t going to be able to contain. When you are dealing with a pandemic, downplaying anything will have dangerous and deadly repercussions. The number of times this administration has downplayed this pandemic is staggering.

Instead of giving false hope in the form of outright lies, you need to overdo it on the front end to stop the spread. The countless ways this administration has mishandled this crisis is the match that is going to ensure this dumpster fire burns longer than it should have. It’s unconscionable the number of US lives and livelihoods they will directly be responsible for ending. We are going to end this pandemic as the country with the highest number of cases and deaths and it won’t even be close.

Why is that? Again…Trump is not on our side. If COVID-19 was a known enemy of the US and was able to plot out the very best way to create destruction, it could not have asked for a better spokesperson than #45.

First case in China…probably 12/1/19. Smoke alarms should have started going off soon after. They didn’t.

First case in US…1/21/20. Smoke alarms should have sounded far and wide. They did not.

And here is where our path as a nation will be forever changed. It’s an epidemic at this point. Worldwide cases were still under 20,000, but spreading fast enough to cause extreme concern.

You would think that the most important thing at that point would be to have testing available to anyone and everyone in the US who needs it. If we don’t know the true numbers, we can’t see how fast it is spreading and therefore can’t lock things down as quickly as we need to. But, if you can’t test, the numbers will look low and the stock market might be more stable.

As Trump pointed out in a Tweet on 2/24, “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA. We are in contact with everyone and all relevant countries. CDC & World Health have been working hard and very smart. Stock Market starting to look very good to me!”

Uh. No. it wasn’t under control. we had no way to test on a large scale. Seattle was getting pounded. California was on its way to being in terrible shape, but still no way to know how fast it was spreading. Our first test kits had gone out on 2/6 (and not getting the WHO test kits in favor of privatizing/making money off this is fucking inexcusable) but there were problems with the reliability of the results.

So “very much under control” is trump speak for “we have no fucking idea how many cases we have in the US and we’re not going to create tests fast enough to find out, but I don’t give a shit because the stock market looks good to me”. The fact that he would mention the stock market at all in a COVID 19 tweet should be alarming by itself.

it’s that constant putting money above human life that is going to be the major talking point when history looks back on this disaster. Well, that and the obvious fool me once, shame on me, fool me by lying to us 18,000 plus times while in office, shame on every single last always trumper. We’re all perma-fucked, because they believed and defended a con man over basic science and the truth. Every single last trump apologist will have blood on their hands.

on 2/24, Romney, a republican, was disappointed that we weren’t doing more in terms of stockpiling medical devices and protective equipment. And the cdc said in our country it’s not “if” but “when”.

So pause the timeline for a second. I don’t know the exact dates, but when you have the NHL, NBA, MLS, NCAA and MLB all willingly giving up billions of dollars, they clearly knew something we weren’t being told. America is about money. And to say no to money means that it was known in advance how bad things would get and required an extreme response by our major sports leagues.

Couple that with the fact that Richard Burr and the other absolute pieces of human garbage that were part of the Intelligence Committee briefing where they found out the truth about COVID 19 in early February, promptly sold off stocks that would be affected, while telling the public that we’ll be fine. When they knew it was a big deal, trump was reassuring us that it was under control, while ensuring that we didn’t have enough nationwide tests to prove him wrong.

This was one month ago. COVID 19 was winning then. And I actually have to stop as far as the timeline goes and get back to what I was writing about in the first place. I can’t take it. I can’t take the fact that they knew. And they lied.

Yes, we’re all about to live out a trauma. Anyone who is paying any attention to the truth can see it coming. And it’s a trauma that will affect all of us for the rest of our lives. Our leaders saw it coming. And were more concerned with making money than keeping us safe. Ventilators aren’t being made fast enough. They’re fucking telling us to sew masks from JoAnn fabrics products instead of giving our front line COVID 19 fighters the hospital grade masks that they need.

We’re going to run out of everything. of equipment. Of nurses and doctors. Of patience. Of crisis counselors.

And that is where I landed after last night’s nightmare. We’ll deal with the obvious stuff. Fuck. As I’m writing this the mayor of atlanta just said their hospital icus are at capacity. With not much testing having been done in the state. Uh yeah. We’re in a helluva lot of trouble as a nation.

I gotta tap out. emotions too much. can’t handle it. we are so stuck on today. everything is fine. No worries. but, it’s coming. Oh my god is it coming. so for the love of God keep talking to your people. and give them space to tap out mentally. this is going to be a strain unlike anything we've ever faced. we have to talk it through and help each other out/pick each other up. can't do it alone.

Read your Robert reich. Read laura casey. And honestly Cake, the band, their facebook feed is full of great info. But, take breaks. This is fucking heavy, but not anywhere near as heavy as what’s to come.

It will be like childhood trauma. We do not have the capacity to process what we’re about to experience. And we’re trusting a mother fucker who keeps suing to keep his taxes secret and says he "might have a natural ability" at dealing with virus outbreaks. Spoiler alert: he doesn't. He’s not on our side.

Note for future reference: Confirmed US cases...over 53k. Confirmed cases in Russia...495