The infections spread. Despite ever more desperate state and local actions, the death toll in America is now, on this first day of April 2020, like three jumbo jetliners full of people crashing each day. It is going higher, and higher. Maybe it will slow, the loss of so many irreplaceable American souls, if we are diligent, and also, lucky. We are full of heroes fighting every second of every day with all the tools they can scrounge and compassion they can muster. They die, the bravest of us, doing their jobs trying to save lives. But when and how much it will slow, is modeled with a wide range of variability. What is clear right now: the USA is the Covid-19 known infections leading nation. Also clear: it did not have to be this way.
The evidence mounts. We learn each week, often each day, that Donald Trump purposely ignored urgent warnings, and denied and demeaned the coming threat. Day after day, week after week, warning after warning. Many others did also, federal and state GOP leaders in the main. They told us to our faces, often gleefully. Even triumphantly. Who cares? Business is good, quit whining and sniveling loser chumps. They were busy rallying, golfing, partying, and doing whatever people do when they think power exempts them from any consequences, even the deaths of hundreds of thousands of their fellow citizens. Now still, April Fools Day, here in the USA as three jumbo jets of humanity die, often alone in their rooms, or out in hallways maybe lucky enough to have their final moments video-streamed to family by one of those heroes, they are negligent, and dismissive, and intransigent in their determination to subjugate our very lives to their political convenience. They say, “save people? Make me ...”. And that is what we have to do. And they must be held to account.
The time has come. We must not be polite. I’m sorry, but we can not forgive anyone yet. We can not, as Mike Pence said today to Wolf Blitzer, “put this behind us”. We owe the dead and the yet to die, and our heroes in the fight, some measure of resolve, some searing examination of culpability as to why they were sacrificed to political goals. To fantasy. To narcissism. To sloth. To the lies of a sneering bully. We must ask, in public and often, to their faces on camera: Why shouldn’t you be criminally charged for the things you said and did, and the things you failed to do, and the lies you told while you did nothing, or did so little?
Why, at a minimum, is this not criminally negligent mass homicide? Or, yes, mass murder? Intentional, cold-blooded, mass murder.
Why not, indeed?