It's the End of the World as We Know It But Do You Feel Fine?

     Recently, I got an email from a friend and reader of mine and I was told of the story of a friend of theirs in New York who was at a Whole Foods who tried to tell a woman she was going down the wrong direction of an aisle (as they're all one way now). Not only wouldn't she move her cart for him, she bumped his cart with her own just to be a vindictive asshole.
     A very minor episode, true. But it serves as a synecdoche of the way Americans are getting decidedly more uncivil toward each other. If you trap enough rats in a bag or box that's small enough, eventually they'll turn on each other if not kill one another to get a little extra space.
     I can't speak much for what's going on elsewhere in the world but human behavior is fundamentally the same the world over. Here in the US, we're bursting apart at the seams. We're seeing an uptick in cases where white assholes call the cops on black people for no reason (it happened the other day in Minneapolis not far from where George Floyd was strangled on Memorial Day, as well as Amy Cooper, who got fired and lost her dog after calling 911 on a black man in Central Park just for asking her to leash her dog).

     Asians are getting assaulted all over the world, here especially, Latinos are getting yelled at for playing Latin music, and a woman was arrested after stalking an Ecuadoran family for miles then came after them with a claw hammer in her hand.

     And, of course, there was the infamous Ozark pool party, featuring an overweight woman wearing a homemade bikini composed of nine surgical masks.

     It's intellectual laziness and complacency, a bloated sense of eternal dominion was what spelled doom for the Roman Empire in AD 476 when they were sacked by the barbarians from the north. So America, an empire since the days of Teddy Roosevelt, will fall, perhaps sooner than we expect. And what better agent to bring that about than COVID-19, except our impenetrable arrogance and callousness toward the lives and safety of others?

     We're so entitled as a race, we white people, that we refuse to wear masks because suddenly the master race has medical conditions that make breathing difficult. Yeah, tell that to Eric Garner and George Floyd.
     Coronavirus has, pardon the pun, pulled back the mask of who and what we are as Americans. We've been revealed as a bunch of racist, angry, bloated, arrogant, ill-tempered louts who couldn't and shouldn't be entrusted with running a hot dog stand let alone an undeclared empire like America.
     The Communist Chinese, who for decades have been buying up massive US corporations, tracts of land and even public works are silently waiting and biding their time. The bald eagle, which once soared over the world, its dominion unchallenged, is losing its pinions at a frightening and alarming rate and will soon be grounded.
     Where the predators below await, licking their chops.