by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
I keep hearing chatter about how COVID19 isn’t “The Big One.” Well, all things being equal, it isn’t. And, yet, maybe it is. The Trump Administration is criminally mismanaging this situation to such an extent that, at least in the United States, it really might be The Big One.
Each nation has a different dynamic to it when it comes to fighting this pandemic. What is rather unsettling is we probably should have shut down all passenger flights some time ago if we were really serious about stopping COVID19 from being The Big One. In the popular imaginnation, because of things like The Stand, we assume that a lot of people would have to die for it to be The Big One.
What if it was just a lot of people got SICK. Like, a huge number. So much so that entire nations (ex: USA) became incapacitated. I think you could call THAT “The Big One.” Trump really is doing everything in his power to screw this up on a massive level. He’s doing a criminally bad job of not only mitigating this situation, but preparing the populace for the next step — triage.
There may come a point when we have to a national “family talk” about some pretty dark things. Like, what do we do when COVID19 rushes into the prison system? What do we do, if anything to save those people? What happens when the health system collapses and people with serious, non-COVID19 illnesses can’t get help? Who pays for all of this? What happens to people who are too sick not to go to work and they can’t go to work? Who feeds their children and keeps the lights on?
And that doesn’t even begin to address both The Gray Plague and the perception crisis that a lot of recorded instances of WuFlop would cause. Those two things in combination in the United States would likely be, in itself, The Big One in the American popular imagination. It would dwarf 9/11 in our culture for no other reason that if 11 million people died, many of them elderly, someone, somewhere might notice and hold Trump, at last, accountable. I DON’T WANT THIS TO HAPPEN. But if it tragically did, I’d at least like our naked emperor to be held accountable on a political level for once.
We’re just not prepared to answer those questions right now. A lot and I mean A LOT of preventable suffering is probably going to happen pretty soon. Sometime between now and The Ides of March is my guess. You can’t lulz something this serious without there being some consequences. The United States is setting itself up for an enormous — preventable — disaster on a pretty historic scale. So much so that it may be “The Big One” to Americans to an extent it is not elsewhere in the world.
Or maybe not.
Maybe Trump’s plan of messaging the base, hoping COVID19 will “burn itself out” and “magically vanish” in April as it grows warmer will work and he’ll use its return in October as an excuse to suspend the Constitution and put me in an ICE Re-Education Camp. Lulz!