Alabama ICUs are being overrun as Covid-19 tears through the state.
I know I appear to be on the liberal end of the spectrum. I’m not by any sane standard. I am merely not right-wing.
But to someone whose thinking is even more binary than mine (and that’s quite a feat), I oughta be punching the air and saying, “Hey, there, dummies! I TOLD you so! Didn’t I tell you so? This is what you GET when you’re STUPID.”
I don’t feel that way about it.
I feel sorry.
I am frustrated at the needless suffering.
No-one wants to do the tedious, boring, endless grind of work that is required to make this better. It’s not as exciting as being Captain America bulleting through a factory to save a friend. It’s not as inspiring as Patrick Swayze fighting for freedom with a pack of hot-looking teenager. (Sorry about the current gut, Jed. I’m there with ya! Getting’ old sucks.)
This is the sort of challenge that America isn’t really very good at, and it’s kind of embarrassing. We’re great a short-term extraordinary effort. We really are, and it’s awesome. I’m glad of that.
Where we’re falling down, and fellow Americans this is getting embarrassing, is at the patient, undramatic work required to build or fix the really big problems, or (when possible) engineer them out of existence.
We’re acting like adolescents with our first car and our first beer shouting, “You can’t tell me what to do!”
We need to learn to tell ourselves it’s bedtime, friends. If we don’t, we’re going to have other nations having a meeting to decide what to do with us, because a virus doesn’t stay within national borders.
I want the problem (inso much as is possible) to be fixed.
We need to grow up as a nation.