It Did Not Have to Be This Way

[mcar]

It Did Not Have to Be This Way
The 500,000 Americans dead from COVID-19 are victims of a profound failure.

By Charles P. Pierce
Feb 22, 2021

A half-million dead.

Holy mother of god, a half-million dead.

The Washington Post designed some helpful visual aids for us to try to grasp the enormity of the butcher’s bill of this pandemic. One helpful calculation is that it would take a nearly 100-mile caravan of buses to carry that many of our fellow citizens, a line of buses on top of which the president could walk all the way from the White House back to his home state of Delaware. But the most signifying one to me is the calculation that, had there been a half-million American casualties during the Vietnam War, the Vietnam Memorial on the National Mall would be a wall 87-feet high. It would require doubling the size of Arlington National Cemetery in order to bury that many dead.
...

Mass mourning of this sort is something for which the country has lost its talent. Our wars are smaller now, and farther away. Mass death usually comes now from nature—Katrina, Maria, tsunamis in the South Seas—or from sudden isolated acts of slaughter, like that perpetrated by Timothy McVeigh or Mohammad Atta. Prolonged mass death, and prolonged mass mourning, runs contrary to the accelerated pace of our times. Taken together, they require the kind of deceleration that comes from contemplation and reflection, two other things for which the country has lost its talent.

It did not have to be this way. We were smart enough at the beginning to face the pandemic with everything we’d learned since the last one. We were smart enough at the beginning to differentiate between what we wanted to believe and what actually was. We were smart enough at the beginning to understand exactly what we needed to do. We just decided not to do it, and now a half-million of us are dead. This is a profound failure of every aspect of American society, as profound a societal failure as the Great Famine in Ireland.

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a35591699/covid-19-500000-americans-dead/

[FSogol]

1. K&R n/t

[sheshe2]

2. A gut punch.

The reality makes it hard to take a deep breath.

[mcar]

5. It is overwhelming

I watched Briana Keilor at 1 on CNN. She did a segment of interviews with those who've lost a loved one to COVID. She was openly weeping (as was I), but said we have to weep, we can't let this pass by.

[sheshe2]

6. I love her broadcasts.

She brings it home, that is where the heart is.

[thucythucy]

3. I understand where this is coming from but

I object to describing what happened this past year as a "we are all responsible" sort of disaster. A failure "of every aspect" of American society. I disagree.

Some of us--many of us--did pay attention to the science.

Some of us--many of us--wore (and continue to wear) masks and practiced and continue to practice social distancing.

Some of our political leaders did in fact tell the truth.

This wasn't a society wide breakdown. It was the failure of a cabal of nihilists and sociopaths, led by one family which was led by one man, which decided to lie, spread misinformation, obstruct the science and the scientists, and otherwise fuck things up as much as they possibly could. Together with their enablers in the various media they were able to dupe the gullible "low information" voters, hype the conspiracy theorists, stir the pot of ignorance and plain thick-headedness that characterizes the most retrograde of our citizens.

Yes, it didn't have to be this way. This is true.

That we are all somehow responsible--not so much.

To me that almost sounds like the first attempt at a revisionist history of this pandemic.

[cate94]

4. +1000

[sheshe2]

7. Disagree.

I object to describing what happened this past year as a "we are all responsible" sort of disaster. A failure "of every aspect" of American society. I disagree.

This article is not about we the people or you. It is about our republicans in charge for decades brainwashing their flock. It is not about you, thucythucy. It is not about the majority of us that wear a mask. Isolate. Don't Travel. Six feet social distancing. Mask Mask Mask. Stay at home.

What we have seen over the past year is the slow unfolding of an unnecessary capitulation to ignorance that we thought was long dead and buried.

A half-million dead.

Holy mother of god.

[BobTheSubgenius]

10. I totally agree with your summation of the whole mess.

Charles Pierce has a real way with words, and can pack a LOT of wallop, but that thesis was wide of the mark.

[patphil]

8. Once we elected callous, uncaring politicians, it began to fall into that category.

That place where the unthinkable becomes the inevitable.
It's horrible to realize that there are so many people in this country who don't care that we lost 500,000 people to a pandemic. It's too bad we can't see the results of bad election decisions before they happen, and it's stunning to know that so many people voted for Trump when it was clear he did an absolutely terrible job in his 4 years as President.

I'd ask what were they thinking, but it's evident they just didn't care what was happening to our nation.

[diverdownjt]

9. nt..

[Warpy]

11. The parallel with the Irish Potato Famine is pretty spot on

The Whig government in England was more concerned with England's revenue stream than with anything going on in Ireland or anywhere else and appointed one Lord Trevelyan to oversee the problem. His answer was laissez faire, that Ireland needed a "correction," his word, and that the deaths of millions of men, women and children were just nature's way.

That's about the attitude of the last administration, as long as the cash flow from big donors was positive, everything must be fine and if a bunch of citizens died, well, that would cut down the unemployment problem.

The lack of leadership and care for other people in both cases is absolutely staggering, and the people in both administrations tend to crow about what great Christians they are.

[Irish_Dem]

12. Some say it was genocide, the deliberate starving to death of 1 million Irish people.

The British allowed it to happen or made it happen?

[Warpy]

15. The importation of the blight in seed potatoes was accidental.

Once the famine had taken hold, the neglect was intentional. You know, like doing nothing as it became clear Covid was in the country and already starting to spread by the end of last January.

[Irish_Dem]

16. Scotland had the same blight, few died. In Ireland the British refused to let the local authorities

help the people. Not true at all in Scotland.

The British were said to be punishing the Irish who refused to toe the British line.
They would not give up their religion or Irish ways.

The famine was a way to teach the Irish a lesson.

The Irish are a proud and stubborn people, they would not bend to British rule.

[lagomorph777]

13. Not a profound failure. A profound success by Putin and Trump.

This is no accident. It is deliberate mass murder.

[Hermit-The-Prog]

14. We had a 'playbook', a manual, telling how to deal with a pandemic. It was discarded.

[mcar]

17. That's right