This Week in Neo-Medievalia

This is the week that the anti-scientific community, the naive, the societally selfish and the defiantly ignorant apparently decided to ramp up their protests against trying to staunch the spread of the coronavirus around the world. 

We had a few hundred gather in front of the statehouse in Boston to rail against the injustice of it all. I think it was this week, too, that, in Michigan, a woman who took umbrage at being told she must wear a mask to enter a Dollar Store, huffed off and then brought back her gun-toting father, who shot dead the security person who tried to enforce the mask requirement. 

Meanwhile the sad and incompetent charlatan tacitly in charge of our federal government is decrying the need for any vaccine and is back to asserting that the virus will just go away. That is indisputably true, if one takes the decadal-long view. In the interim, how many more people will die? We're cruising past 80,000 in the US now. 

Most of us are still doing our best to hunker down, to try to limit the chance that we will contract and/or spread Covid19. This is not to minimize that doing this has come at great collateral cost. Most significantly, in the loss of 30 million people's jobs. 

Of course, while America has the financial ability to see our fellow citizens through the pandemic's corresponding economic disaster, we won't. While peer countries are paying citizens with lost incomes an ongoing stipend, we have thrown trillions out into the wind---meaning that those of us who still have jobs have received the same one-time $1,200 cash payment as those who are unemployed. And, large corporations have raked in millions from the funds designated to help small businesses survive and pay their employees. 

It's maddening and embarrassing that our country's leadership is so inept during this crisis. Thus far, I've not been touched personally by the tragedy that is being abetted by our federal government. Though I worry that my number must come up, in this perverse lottery of survival that re-opening the country for business without adequate testing or plans for response to future recurrences of viral outbreaks will exacerbate. 

We're going with a strategy of luck, indifference, and acceptance that many thousands more must die. Maybe enough of us will refuse to play the role of "warriors" and will stay the course to limit the carnage. If we use the tools available in the twenty-first century, perhaps we can avoid the worst of this contagion's potential medieval miseries. Perhaps.