Monsters

It’s one thing for an adult to be stubborn, selfish and socially irresponsible in the context of a global pandemic. The ignorance and obstinance of Covid-19 deniers, anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers threatens all of us indiscriminately and ensures that the economy will not recover any time soon. But economies are inevitable, they will eventually recover, unlike the sacrificial lambs that comprise our daily mortality statistic as a talking point.

The first wave hasn’t peaked yet. Three million Americans are infected, a quarter of the world’s cases, and we’re trending towards a mortality of 200,000 Americans by the November election. States that opened too early are now facing an economic and healthcare crisis exactly as predicted, forced to rollback as they set new case count records nearly every day.

All that even as Trump proclaims that 99% of cases are not serious. That is a dangerous claim that flies in the face of scientific consensus, grossly ignorant bordering on criminal. His hands are already so bloody they can never be washed. Now he’s rubbing them in your face.

This is the same guy who brought you a Democratic hoax, 15 cases soon to be zero, it will go away in April, windmill cancer, Revolutionary War airports, and an HIV vaccine that doesn’t exist. The guy who shut down Obama’s CDC pandemic response team and then blamed Obama, China, and would presumably blame Where’s Waldo if he could find him. No doubt turned over on a ventilator in an ICU by now.

That guy gets around but he likes to hide in plain sight, innocuous in a crowd just like your kids at Spring Break. Equally dangerous if not more. You can tell from the striped shirt he’s obviously Antifa, Trump’s favorite boogeyman, just like every other libtard sheeple and your punk kids if you’re a Democrat.

But the sad truth of the matter is that we are living in a kakistocracy. The ignorance and ineptitude of the Trump administration and the gullibility of his supporters is magnifying the cost of the pandemic in lives, dollars and American influence. It is robbing us of time, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

We have lost all credibility on the world stage in six short months. We’re the poster child for ineptitude, suffering an ongoing national and humanitarian tragedy of historic proportions with with a president who does not seem to care about his constituents but takes every opportunity to proclaim the greatness of his response, lying openly, embarrassing himself. The US response was the worst in the world, so bad Europe has imposed travel restrictions on Americans.

How ironic. But irony is lost on fools.

After two weeks of breaking infection case count the Trump administration iced the cake by pulling out of the World Health Organization, proving once again they don’t care about Americans, or anybody else for that matter. They only care about the old boys club, NASDAQ and the propaganda news cycle. They care about confederate statues and using AR-15’s in the capitol dome to intimidate legislators into getting haircuts.

They claim to care about the Constitution but haven’t bothered to brush up, much less read about government authority in a pandemic. They claim to care about everybody except “antifa fascists” so “white lives matter” is not tone deaf to them. No more than wishing death upon libtard sheeple protesters in a Facebook Live stream, without a doubt the most repulsive display of moral rot I’ve seen so far, and that’s saying a lot.

They definitely don’t care about Bill Gates, George Soros, or Where’s Waldo, those three are the unholy trinity of a global conspiracy that Q has revealed to them while the rest of us were watching fake news and colluding with an elite international pedophile ring. Sheeple say “bah”, real men read Breitbart. And they definitely don’t care about some libtard kung flu that’s yet another Democratic hoax, much less wearing wearing a mask like a sissy. They saw a YouTube video you couldn’t possibly understand, so you better educate yourself and do some “research” too since you didn’t learn anything getting your liberal arts degree from a treasonous professor.

To date we have tested 39 million people, roughly 10% of the population, the worst per capita of any developed country. Of those tested 9% were positive, 3.4 million people. We can only speculate what the case rate would be if we could test everybody but statistically we’re likely looking at over 30 million cases.

In a stunning display of toddler logic Trump continues to assert that if we don’t test so much we won’t have as many cases. That’s like saying if you don’t get a pregnancy test you can never get pregnant. If you don’t count your drinks you can never get drunk.

For the ammosexuals with great haircuts in the crowd waving around the Confederate flag, that’s like saying if you don’t count your bullets you’ll never run out of ammo. I’ll say that real slow while you get to blazing, Rambo, but please do us all a favor and save one for yourself. Better make that two in case you miss, or can’t count any better than Trump.

Yet true to his convictions Trump has repeated himself and doubled down. He is seeking to reduce federal funding for testing for states that are crumbling under the weight of the infections. Somehow the Republican clown car just honks & keeps driving around the circus. Puts up a few nooses, makes their slave-raping Confederate forefathers proud.

The whole party is a shameful and degenerate expression of callous indifference, profound ignorance and abject racism. Trump is their messiah. They’re anti-science just like him because they have faith in God instead, and you would be too if you weren’t a commie atheist.

Despite the ongoing tragedy of the mishandled pandemic response, continued obstruction by administration officials, dissemination of misinformation and propaganda, we have yet to round the most dangerous corner on the road to our new American dystopia. Never to be outdone and because there is no bottom, Trump has a map and his trusty sharpy, pointing the way for all the blind sheeple. Super Duper Missile daddy has a plan, the best plan, and it’s right up there in his temples underneath his Baron Harkonnen scalp toupee and the festering scabs that hold it onto his glistening skin

As you might expect from such auspicious problem solving (he really has a knock for epidemiology and is the best pathologist anyone’s ever met according to some people, but you never hear about it on the fake news), it’s an evil plan. Truly untempered madness. And as a society we have an obligation to do everything in our power to stop him.

That’s because the next milestone on the map of suffering and woe is not targeting the constituents he despises, foreigners, Muslims or his political opponents. And it doesn’t take aim at his best friends and mentors Putin & Kim because he’s more terrified of them than #blm protestors and doesn’t want to risk offending them, or even getting a frowny face from them on MSNBC.
Instead he’s offering up your children for sacrifice in a Machiavellian gambit. To what end, I cannot fathom. You’d have to be evil I suppose. But fresh on the heels of proclaiming Covid-19 as 99% insignificant Trump has now proclaimed schools must be open in the fall. Anything less will be considered national failure, yet another source of shame, and no doubt intrepid educator extraordinaire Betsy Devos agrees with him.
Showing his allegiance to the very fine people in the Confederate flag / lynching crowd that helped elect him, at a very minimum foreign exchange students must attend campus in person or be deported, holding up a fine Republican tradition of treating immigrants like shit, because they all come from shithole countries, they’re criminals and rapists and have AIDS (apparently they didn’t get the memo about the HIV vaccine that doesn’t exist).

The evil madness of the plan is that with the continued rise in Covid-19 infection rates it is a statistical certainty that many of the children forced to attend schools that should not even be open at all will both become infected and transmit it to their friends, families and teachers and neighborhoods.
It’s inevitable, it’s not matter of if it happens, it’s a matter of how much, how fast, and how long until it becomes unbearable. So the calculus of risk for US school children and their families has fallen under the purvey of a Covid-19 deniar who still, to this day, has failed to marshall the will & direct the resources we as a nation need for recovery.

Trump’s willingness to send your children into the toxic cesspool of a high density closed enclosure with hundreds of unwashed hands, unworn masks, supplies that get passed around and vending machines that are automated petri dish dispensers is not surprising. Given Trump’s cold indifference to children separated from their parents locked in overcrowded cages under deplorable conditions, including a lack of medical care and both physical and sexual abuse, in hindsight we should have expected it. But none of us can match emperor Nero’s talent for cruel depravity so we failed to see it coming.

Well, it’s here. Full stop.

As a parent I urge you not to subject your children to being exposed to a disease that has long term complications that are potentially painful and disabling. It can lead to systemic organ damage, and can result in blood clotting, strokes and lasting neurological damage for those who survive a severe infection. And that says nothing about the mortality of the worst cases. The reality for that population is dying alone, turned over on on a ventilator in an ICU after experiencing incalculable suffering. With no funeral.

You can’t factor any of those risks into some kind of coherent threat model. That’s a fine approach for soldiers and early vaccine recipients, it works great for investment banking, and battlefield triage. But we’re talking about our children. And you, and the rest of your family.

Once one family member is infected the writing’s on the wall. Imagine the devastation your child would experience if they transmitted it to a parent and the parent did not survive, but the child did. It’s the same devastation you’d feel if you gave it to your child, but they’re going to have a long life with that kind of burden, as well the emotional and economic suffering that comes with such a trauma at a formative age.

None of us would want that for any student, with the notable exception of Trump. One asymptomatic student can infect the entire classroom, and each of their peers can go home and infect their families, their neighborhoods, the grocery stores, playgrounds and cafeterias. School cafeterias are right up there with retirement homes and cruise ships as potential vectors of infection. So is breathing hard and shouting and singing, more commonly known among people that are not evil or dead inside as as a fun recess. Maybe gym class for a few twisted individuals.

To what end is this Trumpian experiment? What is the fundamental hypothesis he is trying to prove? That he’s in charge and unqualified? That he’s indifferent to the suffering of children. Maybe that he’s an idiot, the unchallenged king of kakistocracy who thinks he’s smart and surrounds himself with uneducated, ignorant, and cruel people that think he’s smart, too.

We know all of that to be true. The only experiments that we should be doing right now are the ones on a path to vaccines and treatments. The entire biotech industry and their partners in government and education are on a war footing, trying to do something that has never been done before in such a short time. But science takes time. Fundamental research, developing theories, performing experiments, engineering & manufacturing solutions and conducting trials with them all takes time.

These are all hard and fast limits. Production and distribution can be scaled up but the science and engineering needs to be conclusive before any of that can happen. And until a vaccine is widely available, by decree of Trump, your children are going to the frontlines of the pandemic to be part of a future case study on Covid-19 rates of infection in children and the network effect on their families and social graph. A post-mortem, so to speak.

Post on Facebook all you want but if he gets his way, the best protest you can do is to keep your kids home. Commit to home-schooling and distance-learning next year. You’re probably already doing that anyway, and getting pretty good at it by now. You’ve been doing it for a semester. Some of you really like it, and it always lifts my spirits reading about your home-schooling adventures in my news feed. And the parents can always use a refresher unless they’ve been doing trigonometry since the day they graduated high school.

Keep them home, do whatever it takes. Find a way. At least investigate it with the intent to succeed. Split duties with your spouse and extended family, be creative and let them know you’re going to do whatever you can to keep them home so they can enjoy the rest of their summer without the fear of being a subject in a pointless, cruel experiment. They’ve been robbed enough already. Nobody who’s a parent of young children right now grew up in a global pandemic, this is unprecedented for all of us.

Let them be a child this year. We can’t imagine what it’s like for them, being a teenager already sucked and your parents were already dorks and now they’re staying home binge watching Netflix, fighting for the remote and trying to get ahold of a human at the unemployment office. Their social life has been compressed into Zoom & Facetime meetings. Some of them have had to spend time in line at food banks wondering if they were going to go hungry and the most unfortunate among them have already lost family to a menace none of us can comprehend.

Rest assured, your kids are smart. They may even be smarter than you. Regardless, they know what’s going on even if they’re not discussing it with you. Remember, they think you’re a dork. But we all have phones, we all read the same news feeds every day. You can’t get away from it when the global pandemic continues to rage and surge through our daily news cycle.

It’s a monster for the ages, a whisper in the winds from China that covered the world in both directions and seems to grow more vast every day. A tidal wave of scary information and bad news, from intubations to mass graves to unemployment lines and civil unrest.

Save them from the monster. You don’t need to put them in front of it by decree of Trump, or any other man who would be king. Scoop them up and let them feel safe. They deserve at least that much. Even if you can’t protect them from getting the infection they will know you did what you could. It’s very hard to feel safe right now even for the adults in the room. The world needs a hero and every family needs a champion. You’re on deck, soldier.

Your kids will find reassurance in your plans and take comfort in your commitment to their safety and continued education. Your entire family will. And then give them a reason to feel some optimism. Let them know you’re not the only one trying to help them, that there is an army of scientists and engineers working around the clock to create a vaccine and develop treatments for those already infected.

Brush up on your biology. Follow the science as it progresses over the next year to keep infusing them with optimism and a better understanding for both of you as to how society is trying to help them.

Take advantage of the opportunity. Make up for lost time and a broken education system by teaching them about history, racism and civics. If they’re able to do arithmetic and simple algebra start teaching them to program. All science is computer science now and it will be good for both of you to learn new skills and create projects together. You’ll have a blast and share pride in your accomplishments.

Let them come to you with electives that you will both enjoy learning. Encourage them to race ahead in topics they show aptitude for without being held back by the rest of the class. Make music part of your curriculum. The whole family will enjoy it and you will all grow closer through shared experiences in the tradition of gathering around a piano at home, where everybody feels safe and loved.

Finally, demonstrate your resilience by example and teach them to be the same way while they are still impressionable. Rebel against this draconian mandate and show them your cards. Teach them to fish, proverbially or literally. When was the last time you went fishing? You deserve to go fishing. And it might be a good skill to have if the pandemic brings resource shortages to your dinner table.

Because at the end of the day it it really is about them. And you. And monsters.