America Un-Masked

We thought America liked being the most prosperous country on earth in the rules based international order it designed and benefitted from. Highly competent and able to take control of complex situations. Were we wrong?

America we thought we knew you, but you’ve been un-masked, and now we hardly recognize you.

We thought you liked being the most prosperous nation on earth, yet you allowed a virus to cripple your economy while countries around the world managed to stabilize their situations.

We thought you liked being in the driver’s seat, in control of the situation, yet Coronavirus is driving your country right now when in other places around the world it was tossed in the trunk, if not at least strapped into the child seat.

We thought you prided yourself on being competent, at being good at things, yet your President fights with the country’s governors and mayors in the absence of a discernible national plan, as infections rage out of control in your states and cities. You look incompetent right now and it’s confusing to us. You sent men to the moon, you have the top schools and leading minds in the world, why are you failing so badly at this?

We came to know you as the country on this planet that cared most about an international rules-based order, in part because you benefited the most from it. Yet your President backstabbed your own allies and bullied your own businesses when his administration hijacked shipments of personal protective equipment already purchased by countries, only to squander it in the months that followed. Politicizing funding, politicizing everything.

This sacking of supply-chains helped buy enough time for the stock market to rally as the president implored governors in ALL CAPS to liberate states from the yoke of public health measures and reopen. But for many states the “first wave” of the pandemic hadn’t even peaked yet, and reopening was hasty and premature.

America seemed to rally around flattening the “epidemic curve” for all of five minutes before thoughts of chicken wings and beer, pro-sports and theme parks, overshadowed the necessity of staying the course just a little longer with physical distancing, business closures, and other measures.

Because freedom.

Yes we all know America loves its freedom. We now see that it has loved the wrong kind of freedom. We know America cherishes liberty, but amidst the pandemic we’ve see the worst kinds of liberties being taken at the expense of others.

America’s epidemic curve breaks with democratic countries where people enjoy the same freedoms but choose to wear masks and forego partying instead of screaming in each other’s faces about their freedoms.

Sadly, its curve is in line with undemocratic countries and those with authoritarian leaders, because it has one itself. It’s even worse in fact. The worst of any country in the world. America, you told us for decades that you expected yourself to be the best at things, not average, and certainly not the worst.

And you don’t have the worst outbreak of coronavirus of anywhere on the planet just because you have great testing. Which is also a lie.

Why does American freedom favour the belligerent over the benign?

The brutal over the beneficent.

Americans are literally choking on their freedom right now.

We thought you took pride in your globally respected institutes and centres which have made you the envy of the world. Yet your president shames the country’s premier authorities on infectious diseases, like the Centres for Disease Control, demanding that hospitals bypass the CDC and send data on the pandemic directly to him.

Mark my words, at some point in the coming weeks he or someone else in his administration will say the data that the CDC has is wrong and that his is right, because this is what he does. He gaslights you, every day of the week.

While he lashes out at these crucial institutions his own advisors back-stab and smear your leading public health official, Dr. Anthony Fauci. Because Americans trust Fauci more than this President, as they should. As a highly respected doctor he doesn’t imply putting bleach and lysol in your bodies might be a solution to this mess you are in. He doesn’t tell you the virus will be gone next week when it won’t, that everything is going to be fine, when it isn’t.

We thought we knew America as a country that stood up to tyrants, that toppled authoritarian regimes and liberated oppressed peoples from dysfunctional kleptocracies and oligarchies. How long are you going to put up with it happening to yourself?

Perhaps for all the movies and TV shows that projected America onto the world, all the music and interviews broadcasted over radio, for the universe of information about you online telling us who you are, that Shining City on the Hill, you managed to conceal your true self from us America. You are a country at perpetual war, with yourself. Because just maybe you were built on the idea of the supremacy of individual freedom and liberty over the good of the collective. This, in addition to being a conquest of Indigenous territories fuelled by enslavement of Africans.

So let me restate, the supremacy of some individuals over the good of the collective.

Perhaps your current president embodies this.

For this President the pandemic appears to be a battle over TV ratings, stock market numbers, and political polls, a dick measuring contest with public servants and other elected officials, instead of the worst public health crisis the country has seen in modern times.

The competency of America, of American institutions and Americans themselves, has been undermined by President Trump as he has made this pandemic about himself and not the country. As his own niece attests in her newly released book he shows a disturbing lack of empathy and compassion. How many lives lost will change this? If 130,000 isn’t enough, what is?

There is no bottom with this man. He is an abyss into which America is being swallowed whole. A political python of cosmic girth and length.

But we cannot lay the problems of the country at the foot of one man, that would be giving him too much credit. Decades of duplicitous treachery by the two parties who have dominated American politics in its warped two-party system and by the Super PACs that have funded billions into them, the armies of lobbyists and the corporate think-tanks that now do the work of drafting congressional bills, and the lunatic fringe of conspiracy theorists and the maladjusted paranoid who have taken over the airwaves with an asteroid belt of fake news sites and fanatical radio hosts, podcasts and youtube videos, all share in this blame.

Perhaps this president was the final straw. America has been un-masked. The glue and strings that held on the veneer of polite society, rule of law and functioning institutions could not endure a malignant narcissist of such epic proportions. Perhaps it wasn’t in as good a shape as we had all thought.

As Dr. Cornell West recently said, perhaps America is “a failed social experiment” after all.

So what can we possibly learn from this experiment?

That a country which places the freedom of the individual above the health of the whole, particularly when led by an individual that typifies this kind of selfishness, is one that risks crumbling at the moment it needs most to come together?

America, please prove us wrong in the months ahead. Show us there is hope for a new you. You took the mask off and it’s scaring us.