Don’tcha love it when Republicans start asking the old Ronald Reagan question- “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” Well, Sparky, how about we hop in the Wayback Machine and try to remember what was happening four years ago?
If memory serves, right about this time in April 2020, hospitals in New York were storing the bodies of those who’d died from COVID-19 because there was nowhere else to put them. Yeah, there were that many of them. It was like a horrible flashback to a Monty Python movie.
“Bring out yer dead!!”
People were leaning out of their windows at 7 pm and banging on pots and pans to show their appreciation to overwhelmed healthcare workers, who were doing yeoman’s work even as they had no idea as to the scope of what lay before them.
Over the following weeks and months, this country curled up into a collective ball as malls, schools, movie theaters, gyms, and most other public spaces closed. Most of those that did remain open enforced a six-foot social distance separation. That’s, of course, unless you lived in a red state that valued FREEDUMB!! above all else, including safety and public health. In these states, even during the worst of the pandemic, some folks refused to wear masks, get vaccinated, or take even the most basic precautions.
Then-President Trump’s response? “It is what it is!”
Of course, natural selection being what it is, many of these freedumb-lovers were among the first to become ill and die. Not to be callous, but given these folks' opportunities to take precautions, which might have saved their lives and others around them, they got what they deserved.
The per capita death rate from COVID-19 in red states was higher than in blue states, mostly because people in red states refused to follow basic, common sense precautions. They didn’t trust scientists and doctors and refused to compromise their “FREEDUMB!!” The result was that many were far more likely to get sick and die.
Seldom was natural selection proven more frequently than during the pandemic.
We still live in a country where many, primarily in red states, don’t trust competence, training, and education. They fail to see the value in years of schooling and real-world experience when they can go to Google or WebMD and get the information they need.
Sorry, but if I need someone to do surgery on my brain, I want to know that it’s someone who’s trained for YEARS, not someone who, until last week, pumped gas at a Kum & Go and then watched a few YouTube videos.
Ok, which wire do I cut? Is it the red one or the blue one??
In effect, we’ve become a nation of simpletons, people who believe there are simple answers to complex questions because Donald Trump told them so. And because Trump told them so, they don’t believe what the science says, what their doctor tells them, or even what their own eyes tell them. They believe only what Trump tells them.
There are a couple of words for people like this- fucking morons.
It’s people like this who make me wish there was a way I could be stuffed into a rocket and blasted to another planet- somewhere, anywhere I’d never again hear the words “Donald Trump,” “MAGA,” or “Make America Great Again.” This country is already pretty damned great. All the MAGAnauts want to do is drag America down and beat the shit out of it until there’s nothing left of it but a shell that looks and sounds like the set from Idiocracy.
And, if you listen to what The Daily Show’s Jordan Klepper found recently, the MAGAnauts aren’t too far away from achieving their goal of dumbing America down to the point where it resembles a cross between a Captain American comic book and the product insert from a box of Viagra.
No person should have to subject themselves to this mind-numbingly dense drivel, even if they do have a degree from YouTube State University.
Of course, one must also consider that Donald Trump is a holy man of God who was anointed to lead America into something. I’m not quite sure what, but Evangelical Christians don’t care, and they love him. It’s not easy to understand why because Trump is one of the most (perhaps THE most) unChristian men ever to soil the Oval Office. He’s been married three times, filed bankruptcy on six occasions, is a rapist and serial sexual assaulter, and told more than 30,000 documented lies during his time in the Goya Beans White House ©.
And those are just the “highlights.”
The question then, at least in my mind, isn’t whether we were better off four years ago- because we sure as Hell weren’t- but what we want America to be four years from now.
I think we can all agree that things aren’t perfect, but most of what Joe Biden said he wanted to do has been done or is in the works. The economy is far better than it was when Trump was President, and virtually every meaningful metric is better now than it was under Trump. So, where do we go from here?
First, we need to ensure that we re-elect Joe Biden. Second, we need to provide him with Democratic majorities in the House and Senate. It’s the only way he’ll be able to get things done without dealing with Republican crazies in the Freedumb Caucus and their stalling tactics.
If those two things can happen, America has a reasonable shot at getting back on track. Sure, half of the country will be pissing and moaning about “Liberals,” “Socialism,” “something for nothing,” and all sorts of other meaningless crap. But let ‘em piss and moan because that’s all they’re good at. When Republicans have been in power, they haven’t accomplished anything of meaning or value.
We can make America a country that cares about its people again. We can be a country that meets its international obligations and helps its allies (Ukraine). We can play the role America was meant to play, but Republicans are too timid to take on.
We should be able to do these things because we’ve been able to do them before…until Republicans decided that America wasn’t big enough to do them anymore. America is big enough. It always has been and always will be. We need to recheck our priorities, stop giving tax breaks to billionaires, and do what American governance should do.
Republicans think we can no longer do these things and shouldn’t be doing them anymore. Their vision is limited and cowardly, and they’re afraid to risk doing big things. They want America to shrink back to within its borders and allow bad actors like Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán to have their way.
We can, and should, do better.
It’s not that hard, y’all. All it’s going to take is courage, will, and the resolve to stand up to bullies like Donald Trump and the rest of the GOP.
And if someone could PLEASE put Trump behind bars, that would be a great start, don’tchathink??
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You don’t know whether to laugh or cry watching those videos, it’s a dystopian nightmare. One can only guess that their central nervous symptom has been over myelinated with orange matter and fear, thus creating sever dainbramage in the frontal lobe.