We Need to Jettison This Fortnight Mindset

     We've lost over 10,000 of our species to coronavirus and COVID-19. We need to come to grips with the fact that it's spreading at an exponential rate. Average citizens and celebrities, rich and poor alike and everyone in between are now hunkering down at home. If you live in California, New York or Illinois, staying at home is mandatory barring life-sustaining activities. Schools from kindergarten to college are shut down, festivals. conferences and book signings have been canceled. No one's making any new TV shows or movies and pretty soon we'll be watching reruns and streaming old movies on Netflix or Disney+.
     Stop waiting for the moment when the numbers stop spiking. Stop waiting for life to return to normal so we can go out and enjoy the new spring. This is the new normal, just as 9/11 gave us a new normal in which fear and suspicion became a way of life. We've passed the tipping point, the point that nudges human history, human thinking and human activities into bold, or not so bold, new directions.
     We've already lost more than three times the humanity that we lost on 9/11. That's a big fucking deal.
     I don't think this disease, which is turning out to be more communicable than even the world's best epidemiologists predicted, will wipe out humanity. Humankind has always miraculously found a way to endure, as stubbornly and insistently as water finding the path of least resistance or a plant springing up in a sidewalk crack.
     Two week-long quarantines are meaningless, especially if you live in a state in which the Governor has locked down until further notice. Highways are barren. Buildings, emptied of humanity. Those who can work from home, do. Those who can't, well, who knows what will happen to them?
     Trump's $1.2 trillion stimulus, surely the most profound manifestation of his desperation to hang onto power for another four years, is being debated by Republican senators and other feckless cunts posing as our leaders whose most proactive response to the coronavirus pandemic is to sell their stock after getting a closed door briefing last January.
     Two days after announcing he was invoking the Defense Production Act of 1950, which empowers the government to press private industry to ramp up production of goods in the event of a war or civic emergency for the national good, has been a no-go. So far, Trump hasn't used those powers, presumably because the companies that make the masks, respirators and testing kits we desperately need are ones in which Trump doesn't own stock.
     Because that's what Republicans do- Like Rahm Emanuel once famously said, "Never let a crisis go to waste." When Republicans learn in their privileged information that may or not not trickle down to the rest of us that much of humanity and the global economy could be wiped out, their first thought is selling their stock, trying to get a monopoly, a patent on a cure or vaccine and, always, tax cuts.
     Boeing has already stretched out its grasping hand, making Nikki Haley resign from their board. Despite getting trillions in government contracts over the last few decades, they want a bailout. So does Wall Street, even after Goldman Sachs gave their CEO a 19% bump in pay.
     So, while cutting $1000 checks to average Americans who don't make $27.5 million a year with maybe, maybe another one to follow in nine weeks is getting lip service, the people and corporations I've just mentioned? Well, as usual, they get to cut first in line. That's what Trump calls, "the story of life."
     So, I'm not going to tell you to write to your elected officials because I wouldn't have the slightest fucking idea what to tell you to write to them. But they wouldn't read it, anyway, in their posh, comfortable quarantines. Calling their offices is more useless as even their staff won't be there to field your calls or listen to your panicky voice mails.
     Bottom line, folks, we have a blithering fucking idiot in charge whose daily press briefings about coronavirus are really just therapuetic grievance sessions for an incurious oaf who literally is not thinking beyond November 3rd this year. Those elected officials who are smarter are thinking of their stock portfolios as well as their own reelection chances.
     Newsom, Cuomo and Pritzker have already taken charge by issuing what amounts to a clampdown in their respective states in all but non-essential services. The states, obviously, are on their own and, unless, you have millions in stock of which you've already divested before the Dow Jones lost 10,000 points in a few short weeks, you're on your own, too.
     I imagine pretty soon, all food pantries and soup kitchens will be closing, too. The homeless? Who knows what'll happen to them? The tens of thousands of migrants we still have packed like sardines in over 100 detention facilities from Texas to Massachusetts are either the safest people in America or the most vulnerable.
     But whether you live in a small four room apartment like me or a mansion like Gal Gadot or Arnold Schwarzenegger, you're hunkering down for the long haul and praying, if that's your belief system, for this to all blow away, that the casualty numbers, if they can't go down, will at least slow down.
     However, that's not going to happen for a while. It will not go away when your self-enforced or medically-advised 14 day quarantine goes away. There aren't testing kits for those of us not in the NBA because that's how your Dear Leader wanted it. Not having them helps keep the numbers artificially suppressed because we can't report cases we don't know about. And, worst case scenario, there could be tens of millions of us walking around asymptomatically and spreading it all over the place. China was Ground Zero for this and, if they're to be believed, they've finally gotten a handle on this crisis. Now Italy is the new Ground Zero, having lost more of their citizens than even China.
     Next month, it could be our turn.