The Boston Globe, a leading American daily founded and based in Boston, Massachusetts recently carried 15 pages of obituaries even as the Coronavirus Pandemic continues to hurt the United States with more than 7,60,000 confirmed cases, along with over 40,000 deaths.
The United States is witnessing more deaths than anywhere else, and the single-day death toll recently crossed the 9/ 11 toll. Every second day in the US today is, in fact, a 9/ 11 in its own right which gives a measure of how devastating the silent killer, viz. Wuhan virus has proven for the biggest economy in the world.
15 pages of obituaries in The Boston Globe today. pic.twitter.com/DdcWiy2hvx
— Nancy Palmer (@npalmerrothman) April 19, 2020
At the core of the ongoing misery in the United States is absolute administrative apathy towards one of the biggest Pandemic that has hit the world in a long time. While the death toll continues to mount, the United States President Donald Trump has already announced guidelines to open up the economy and ease Coronavirus restrictions.
From the very beginning, however, Trump was taking the Pandemic rather casually, and only last month, he had equated COVID-19 with the Flu. While India, which witnesses scorching heat was bracing for “Janta Curfew” and lockdowns, the United States President was banking on American summers to kill Coronavirus.
In early March, Trump had said, “A lot of people think that (novel Coronavirus) goes away in April, with the heat, as the heat comes in, typically that will go away in April.”
Not just Trump, but the entire US establishment downplayed the threat posed by the novel Coronavirus. By mid-March, Trump wanted the US economy to re-open by Easter Sunday and Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick was suggesting that he and other older Americans should be willing to sacrifice their lives for the sake of the American economy.
But what were the Democrats doing? No one was really bothered about the Pandemic that was coming upon the Americans. Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the United States House of Representatives too was busy ending “discrimination” against Asian Americans.
In February, she was encouraging public gatherings in San Fransisco’s Chinatown in order to ‘end the discrimination’ against the Asian Americans. Yes, public gatherings when the entire world was looking at social distancing. Now, the California Democrat claims that her Chinatown visit actually helped prevent the Chinese virus, but of course, she didn’t care to explain how.
In fact, no one in the United States is addressing the real issue, that is, deaths due to Coronavirus. Joe Biden, former Vice-President of the United States, too has been busy criticising Donald Trump over xenophobia.
Since no one had really woken up to the threat posed by the novel Wuhan virus, today no one is in a position to criticise Donald Trump, and his rivals are today sparring over with him over how to ease Coronavirus restrictions. Trump believes that he being the President has the sole authority to decide on how lockdowns in the States are to be eased.
But the Governors say that no nationwide lockdown was enforced by the Federal government in the first place. The individual States had enforced different social distancing measures as per the discretion of the Governors, and now several of them are discussing the plan to exit the restrictions without taking any inputs from the President.
What the President and Governors are doing in the United States- denialism, downplaying and sparring over unnecessary issues actually represents the American psyche that has come to the fore once again.
The United States, being the land of the free, the protest-public administration thrives here, which is yet again at the display. There have been real protests in States like Minnesota, Michigan and Virginia, all of them found support in Donald Trump who wrote in a series of tweets- “LIBERATE MINNESOTA”, “LIBERATE MICHIGAN” and then “LIBERATE VIRGINIA”.
https://twitter.com/onlytruthhere/status/1251170799395848199?s=20
The United States is a privileged, somewhat undisciplined society that has never seen a crisis of the kind that it is witnessing now. Since Independence, the country never confronted a real crisis, as all of its military disputes- World War II, Vietnam, Korea, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya and Afghanistan, were far away from its borders. And it wasn’t affected by any Pandemic as such, except Spanish influenza.
The worst the United States witnesses is tornadoes and has no preparation for disasters of the kind that has hit the country now. This is why issues like gun control and protecting archaic gun laws is such an emotive issue in the United States. The free society makes a mountain out of what is not even a molehill when it fails to find real issues.
The United States is the hub of all conspiracy theories from the fake moon landing to flat earth theory and anti-vaccination, but when the real threat came knocking at its doors, it failed to respond.
The United States politicians- Joe Biden, radical socialist Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, all of them come from the same society characterised by free speech extremism. The US politicians thus appear either ineffective or ideologically radical, both of which don’t help in times like this. Small issues tend to get played up, while real threats like Coronavirus are buried under the carpet.
Now, as the United States stands in complete anarchy amidst a severe crisis, all of its shortfalls- high levels of Federation, extremely rights conscious society, extremist politicians and a liberal media downplaying the Pandemic have come to worsen the ongoing crisis.
