Burning in a Fire as a Sacrifice

I can't believe it's been two months since I went into self-quarantine, battened down the hatches, and began engaging in strange behavior, like disinfecting all my groceries. Strange behavior, yet in today's world, I have a bunch of friends who would consider me recklessly odd if I didn't do that. It's been two months too since I started blogging again - really more of a vanity project to get me past the coronavirus crisis, and to leave a record maybe for future historians of what life was like during the pandemic of 2020.

That may sound grandiose. But it is exactly by poring over ordinary people's personal diaries, letters, and other contemporaneous  records that historians gain insight into what was really going on during any era.They look behind the official records, newspapers, and accounts by the leaders to examine and gain a better understanding of what life was like for the majority of common people, what the public was thinking, observing, and saying about day-to-day events. So much of what we understand about the everyday lives of ordinary people living through extraordinary events comes precisely from such diaries and correspondence.

With social media, blogs, personal journals, I hope future historians will have a rich motherload of source material to decipher and write about our era. And I hope it won't be kind to Donald Trump, the Republicans who enabled him, and to those governors who rushed to open their states before they were ready. Before they met the CDC guidelines. Before they had adequate testing. Before rates of infection were going down. We met none of the CDC metrics.

I don't think any other civilized country - any other developed or emerging nation - has been so behind the testing curve as the US. Nor has any other nation rushed to reopen while rates of infection were still rising. Let history well record that the wealthiest nation that should have been a world leader, as it had always been in the past, stumbled and failed miserably to lead, to protect even its own citizens. Instead, it asked us to sacrifice our health, our safety, our lives for the portfolios of the richest one percent.

No, Donald Trump, we are not warriors. We are sacrifices to your god of Mamon. We are burning in the fire while your cronies dance around the golden calf.