Day 113…
I’m reading a book called Wanderers by Chuck Wendig.
Wanderers is a kind of end of the world apocalyptic novel in much the same vein as Stephen King’s, The Stand. Without giving anything away, people start sleepwalking and can’t be woken up, nor can they be restrained.
The book was published last year so Wendig was already aware where our current Administration was heading. Plot lines are eerily prescient of what we are living through now. The words pandemic, white supremacy, militias, vaccine and many other words that we are now used to hearing on a daily basis, figure prominently.
I haven’t finished it yet, but things are not going well.
I’ve always been drawn to this genre of fiction. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven and Justin Cronin’s The Passage trilogy all deal with either the world as we know it ending, or what happens after it’s ended. I really enjoyed all of them. My favorite of all of them being, of course, The Stand.
What’s amazing to me is that the same mistakes that people and governments make in these books are very clearly being made now in real time. Venal politicians follow their own interests rather than the needs of the people and all hell breaks loose. With that last sentence, am I talking about what happens in the books or what we are seeing happening in our own current reality?
Just yesterday, our President said, “I think we're going to be very good with the coronavirus. I think that at some point that's going to sort of just disappear." He said this as we hit the new milestone of 50,000 NEW cases of COVID-19 in a single day.
I know that we are getting numb to these numbers, but 50,000 people sick in a SINGLE DAY is a truly HUGE number.
The states whose Governors are following the President are exploding worst of all.
There were 10,100 new cases reported yesterday in Florida. Over the last month, they have had a total of 100,000 new cases. That’s just about the ENTIRE population of Richmond, Virginia or Burbank, California.
Texas had over 9,300 new cases yesterday. There are nearly 7,000 people currently hospitalized in Texas today. That’s starting to look like a pretty full stadium’s worth of people. Texas refuses to release state-wide data, but two Houston hospitals are now having to turn people away because of over-crowding.
It’s not just Republican-held states, either, California with a Democratic Governor, is seeing their numbers spike.
Governor Newsom has put nearly 72% of the state back on near total lock-down. This came about because people were listening to the President and complaining that their rights were being infringed upon by being forced to wear a mask and not gather together. Rather than moving towards reopening now, the state is in a worse position than it was at the beginning.
Arizona’s hospitals are at 88% capacity and steadily rising. Gyms and movie theatres, that should never have been reopened in the first place, are now closed again.
In putting all of his focus on reopening the economy, and completely downplaying and ignoring any of the health concerns, the President is pretty much dooming the economy.
It’s not just the virus that he’s not dealing with, he’s also not addressing the social justice issues that have come to the fore following the senseless murder of George Floyd at the hands of a policeman in Minneapolis.
To get the President’s attention, the Mayor of Washington D.C. painted the words “Black Lives Matter” in giant letters on the street leading up to the White House. The Mayor of New York is planning to do the same thing in New York on 5th Avenue in front of the building that usually serves as his international headquarters.
The President’s response to this has been to call the words on the street “a symbol of hate”. He went on to further tweet that painting the words outside his building would have the effect of “denigrating this luxury Avenue.” The more he continues to turn a blind eye to the very real racial issues in this country, the more he will be consumed by them.
If health concerns and racial justice concerns were not enough, he now finds himself in yet another quagmire in terms of his relationship with Russia.
When it came to light that the Russians had been putting a bounty on American lives in Afghanistan by offering the Taliban cash in exchange for specifically targeting American troops, the President’s defense amounted to saying that he doesn’t read his intel, so he didn’t know.
What started to come out yesterday was that the President reacts so negatively to anything said against Russia that much of the time, such information is kept from him by his handlers.
The so-called “Gang of Eight” is a bi-partisan group of Senators - 4 Republican and 4 Democrat - who are routinely briefed by the Executive Branch on classified intelligence matters.
They knew.
In the last few days, since this information has come to light, the President has made at least 6 calls to the Russian President. There have been no discussions whatsoever about possible US reprisals against Russia. The President dismisses the whole matter as a “hoax”. It does not appear to be anything like a hoax.
All of this would be right at home in any of the novels I’ve mentioned. In those books, when things like this aren’t addressed, they never just go away. They get worse.
And worse.
It seems clear that we are heading back towards another national shut-down. How can we not? The numbers are as bad as they have ever been, and they are growing at a truly alarming and relentless rate. Nothing that the White House is currently doing will stop this. Any basic reader can follow this plot line. If anything, it is a bit too obvious.
It was reported that 4.8 million jobs were added back into the nation’s economy last month. That very good news caused a notable rise in the markets. At the same time, 1.4 million Americans filed for unemployment for the first time. How long will those 4.8 million new jobs last if we end up just having to shut everything down again?
It’s probably a good idea for all of us to steer clear of apocalyptic fiction for the moment. That said, I’m not going to be able to stop reading Wanderers any more than I can really turn off the news. I kind of know where it’s all going, but there’s always room for a good surprise.
While I think that it is important not to stick our heads in the sand about any of this, its equally, if not more important, not to let any of it keep us from being able to sleep. Nevil Shute’s On the Beach is another great novel but it should definitely not be read until we are well past all of this.
We have it within our power to get through all of this safely. We aren’t under attack by zombies and vampires, just by selfish idiots. To fight them, we just need to be smart.
In the 1983 film WarGames, Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy race to save the world from nuclear annihilation at the hands of a computer. At the end of it (spoiler alert), the computer comes to realize that the only way to win at nuclear war, is not to play the game.
This weekend, we celebrate the day that we declared our country’s independence from England. Let’s declare our own by celebrating with only one or two people while wearing masks and keeping distant or with a whole rave full of people online in a Zoom call. If we do that now, maybe next year we can all have a big blow out somewhere together - complete with hugging, dancing and singing at the tops of our lungs.
In order to win, we need to not play the game. Just for the moment.
Perhaps, stay home and read a book.
It may end up being a quieter 4th of July than most of us are used to, but it will be a much safer one.
some people wear denial like a robe
regal, safe, a blanket
cause if it were pulled from them and they confronted the light of the truth
they’d die instantly
Maybe playing the game
the one that wins
is to stay home and read a book
the new normal works just fine for me
learning how enough I am by
being
still
easy to run, talk, shop
sitting still
with just me
is quite the challenge
profound all by itself
💕