And now we have COVID19. The infection count hovering near one quarter million
in this country alone. And again, thousands of deaths and many aftermaths?
more to come. Countless lives disrupted each in a different way. Hundreds of
millions of dollars in lost or destroyed business in the only pandemic any of
us will ever see.
We’ve long said the farther you were from the
Trade Center, the Pentagon or the crash field in Pennsylvania, the lower and
less durable your emotional reaction. That’s still true. And it’s true of the
pandemic. Except this time, ground zero isn’t a tiny spot of land on a
small island on the eastern shore, a building complex in metro Washington or
acres of farmland.
Ground zero has come to you.
The flying Islamic terrorists misread us. They
picked
what was to them symbols of all they hated about
America. And they underestimated our willingness to dive into the
wreckage, rebuild it and seek vengeance. They picked a country that pays
far less heed to symbolism than they do.
The virus can’t read. Instead, it spreads to
every home, every street, every corner of everywhere. You never know if or when
the attack will hit you. And while this time there’s adequate warning and
ways to minimize the biohazard, the terror doesn’t know or recognize its effect
on you. Nor does it care.
Were either of these matters avoidable?
Yes and no. The Bin Laden crowd or something like it was going to attack
us somehow. They’d done it in the past. There was no reason to think they
wouldn’t again.
We had a decent early warning alarm for
COVID. Official Washington ignored it; minimized it. Official Washington
dismembered the means we once had to deal with it early and effectively.
The disease was going to land here. We knew about when. We knew about
where. We knew about how.
But what we got from the White House and from
much of Congress was hot air. And deaf ears to the warnings of scientists and
virologists and public health experts who’d spent a lifetime researching and
trying to fight such germ warfare.
We had the medical equivalent of radar to know
what was happening. We had warnings that were silenced by the louder bellowing
of politicians bloviating and telling lies. We had to search for truth when
truth is what our so-called leaders should have amplified, not muffled.
So, now what?
At this writing, pharmaceutical labs are working
on vaccines. Localities are mostly doing their best with inadequate
resources in teaching us how to protect ourselves and enforcing that
protection, haphazardly at best.
From Washington: we couldn’t hear the
messengers. Thereby, the messengers started to kill us. They were aided
by a vast and scattered mob of the delusional, the disaffected, and both the
embracers of authority and its rebels.
We can’t stop COVID any more than we could stop
an airliner crashing into a building. But we can and must replace the
messengers who still try to kill us. And maybe this time, the figures will
tell the whole story.
I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but
you’re welcome to them. ®
Any Questions? wesrichards@gmail.com
© WJR 2020
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