Getting Our Bearings
These days it is difficult to know what is up and what is down. For the past five years, America has been in the grip of a man who hated every human being on this planet. He thought that he deserved recognition for all of the great things he did, like surviving at least three bankruptcies, destroying the image of the Republican Party (in the remainder of this article, I will call them the GOP). He managed to take down anything good that anyone had done for our fellow man. I am not going to speak to the physical acts of this individual but more to the dangerously, damaging attitudes that he fostered within the hearts of people who felt that they were already being mistreated. It is too hard to fathom that in just that short time of aligning himself with some of the worse actors in politics on our planet, he took them all for a great big lie ride. Sadly, even those people who were once calling themselves the moral majority now are having to deal with an unspeakable crisis of death from a pandemic in our country. Another leader who was truly caring would have immediately put all of the scientific knowledge on the table and set up a program to begin to change this terrible state. More people have died from this virus than have died in all of the wars combined. We have been losing as many as 4000 people each day from this Corona-19 Virus. It is a terrible plague and oppresses those of color more quickly. Also, those of color in our population are more prone to die from the virus. We don't have an accessible health care system. You would think that one of the greatest, most progressive Nations on the planet would be able to take care of everyone but it seems that those of lesser means end up bearing the consequences of this disease. It is a moral outcry! How can this be?! It should not be.
I recall during the AIDS epidemic those infected were treated with great fear. They felt betrayed by everyone. The diagnosis could mean loss of employment, loss of insurance coverage and loss of life. Regardless of the cause of the disease, it needed to be treated. The initial efforts at controlling its spread treated gay men as a pariah. It took years to change that view. This plague is far more frightening because it doesn't have just one way to spread. It can live on droplets in the air for sometime causing those who are trying to prevent the spread to insist on mask wearing. This virus has infected infants to geriatric. It has infected 24.7 million people in the US and nearly 100 million world wide. It has caused travel bans because of concern about it. It has morphed into a more contagious disease in recent months. Just in the US we have lost 400,000+ people as of this date. We will easily lose another 200,000 before the end of this year. We learned of this disease in February 2020. Now it is January 2021 and little has change except more cases averaging 216,163 per day in the USA.
Our new president has a totally different tone than our last one. He wants all of us to succeed. He is planning to restore our faith in the constitution. It has been decimated over the past 5 years because the last president did not know what it was and the most frightening part was that he did not care about anyone but himself and his family. Every day those people who normally felt blessed by living in America, found themselves wanted to sell out and move to another country. I heard one news caster state exactly how I felt, "I feel like I have left an abuser. Beaten down and unable to believe that there could be real change." I knew exactly how he felt. I have never lived with an abusive person but I have counseled with people who have and the daily beatings on twitter, on tv phone calls, on facebook reminded us of how little we had to say about the way we wanted our life to go. This abuser was going down and he planned to take everyone he could with him.
Two of my children(adult) bought into the conspiracy theories that he was constantly spreading. One of my children informed me that he was always smart, smarter than anyone. I said nothing. It was pointless. People who feel powerless about their lives or who feel that somehow, someone has taken over their hopes and dreams need to be invested in something. Trump gave them that. He gave them his absurd, idiotic parroting of unhinged, unintelligent thoughts. It is so sad that people have been duped by the lies delivered by someone they thought was concerned about their best interest. I have met others who have jumped on the QAnon. People are often frightened by the way they feel left out. Nothing is working out for them. Our society has always looked more kindly at the rich and looked down on those who "can't carry their own weight". The truth is that employers do not pay people a living wage. If they want people to be able to care for themselves, they need to raise the minimum wage and lower prices. I remember not knowing where my next meal was coming from. Going to a church food distribution center to get food to eat. That is the reality for many people in this country. Many people will continue to be annoyed by what has occurred in that Trump lost the election. My children told me how little I knew. They had swallowed the lies in big gulps not pausing for even a moment to reflect on what they were told. Their views of me I guess were negative. I don't believe anything without clear evidence. My Dad was an investigator. He taught me how to think. In most cases, I have done the right thing. The only thing that has happened is the fact that I tend be too honest and a lot of people aren't comfortable with the truth. I have had the courage to question actions that were at worse mistakes but more often were deliberate.
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