I awoke this morning and was greeted with this story about anti-lockdown protests in deep blue California. Yesterday, reading the comments on boston.com’s story about Governor Baker’s latest order concerning masks here in Massachusetts, I was struck by the sharp contrast with the comments I saw a month and a half ago. Back then, everyone was worried that Baker wasn’t going far enough; “Shut down MA!” they all demanded. But yesterday, the commenters were all demanding he loosen the restrictions. The tide would seem to have turned; where people seemed to be afraid of getting sick and dying, now they’re worried about not being able to make a living.
Trump’s administration failed this country spectacularly; even by Ayn Rand standards, with government’s mission limited to protecting the community from external threats, Trump and his party are miserable failures. They remind me of the President of the Colonies in 1978’s “Battlestar Galactica”, who lamented “I have led the entire human race to ruin” as the Cylons blew them all to kingdom come.
Once Trump’s people failed to contain the virus, and it started spreading in the general population, it became unstoppable; all anyone could hope to do was slow it down long enough for someone to develop an effective treatment or a vaccine. The only way to slow it would involve depriving millions of Americans of the means of putting food on their tables and a roof over their heads. Other countries with robust social safety nets might be able to tolerate months of enforced isolation, but could this one, whose unofficial motto has always been “every man for himself”? It felt like a race against time, and a desperate one at that. Even if the supply chain for essentials, like food, remained intact, sooner or later people would run out of patience once paychecks stopped arriving but bills kept coming. Could a breakthrough in treating the virus be achieved in time?
The more we hear and read about these protests, the more they will proliferate as disaffection grows. They are the distant rumblings of a coming storm. Can it all hold together long enough for medical science to deliver the tools we need to stop the pandemic? Or are the social distancing dams, and perhaps even social order itself, about to break?
The media — especially social media such as Twitter and Facebook — are not helping. And Emperor Trumpulus is still fiddling as more and more of our country begins to burn.