The year 2020 dawned auspiciously, in the middle of a presidential impeachment. Republicans embarrassed themselves in defense of Donald Trump, who was quite obviously guilty. Partisanship was rampant. Trump was defiant, as always, a chronic liar full of boorish boasts and infantile attacks on the press or anyone who dared to oppose him.
There were devastating wildfires in Australia and California, and devastating swarms of locusts in Africa. Then there was Covid, as we affectionately came to refer to it. Also known as Coronavirus, Covid 19, as it first appeared in the year 2019. It came to America in February. It had been on its way here for a while, but Trump denied it. Next thing you know, because we had a president who had not prepared and would not prepare, we were in the middle of an out-of-control pandemic.
The effect on the population was stunning. As we watched refrigerators full of bodies pile up in New York, the nation went into shutdown. Jobs were lost, people got sick, people died. There was no protective equipment for health workers, and limited availability of testing for contact tracing. The only thing Trump did was to incite verbal wars with Democratic governors.
Trump did everything wrong. Everything. He stood against testing, he stood against masks, he stood against organizing a national response, and he pushed reopening too soon, spiking another increase in cases.
So health too, had become a partisan issue. Apparently, Republicans are so far gone that they can’t even do that very basic thing right.
The more minor impacts at first were somewhat mildly baffling. You could not buy toilet paper at first, to this day I don’t understand why. Sanitizer was hard to come by. People got cabin fever from being locked in their homes. At least that one was understandable. Some people got automatic rifles and stormed a state government, apparently because they needed a haircut.
When the country reopened, it became a partisan culture war as to whether or not to do a simple and kind thing for the person next to you – wear a mask to protect the person next to you in case you were an asymptomatic carrier. This folly was led by Donald Trump himself.
Churches and bars were the most likely places to catch the infection. Predominately Trump supporters who followed his lead and refused to wear masks. In my own life, a man in a store told me wearing a mask violated his rights. Well, I asked him, what about a seat belt? That kinda confused him, but then he agreed, that violated his rights as well. It was completely nonsensical.
Then there was George Floyd. To this day, I wish I had not watched the video where literally a police officer suffocated Mr. Floyd as the man lay helplessly on the ground, not resisting arrest. The arrogance on the face of the policeman was astounding. The thought that kept going through my mind was, “What if that were my black co-worker’s child?”
The peaceful protests were righteously overwhelming. The violence was perpetrated by the right. So Donald Trump sent in the storm troopers against the peaceful protesters, and the Republican Senate held police reform hostage. It will take a new regime entirely, from the top to the bottom, to undo the damage the Republicans have done.
Eventually, we resumed some semblance of normalcy although there remained many limitations. Eventually, there was toilet paper in the stores again. Businesses reopened cautiously and some not so much, but we learned to go about our lives again. Eventually, after multiple public temper tantrums, people started to wear masks.
We got used to living with Covid.
We never got used to Trump. I wrote a book. It was better than being enraged.
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