When Will the Frog Jump Out?

     Our nation is burning up.
     From within and without. If it isn't the wildfires on the west coast that are blithely ignored by Donald Trump, who looks at the western states as a lost cause in his Quixotic reelection bid, it's the coronavirus that's already claimed 200,000 American lives.
     The daytime cityscape of San Francisco in northern California had been accurately compared to Ridley Scott's Blade Runner while others have gone there and compared it to Hell itself. Trump's response to the west coast wildfires is essentially identical to his so-called response to COVID-19- Nonexistent. And when he deigns to acknowledge this disaster, it's to blame Democrats, advance conspiracy theories, "play it down" or advance quack "cures" like a cable TV pitchman.
     Recently, Trump dusted off an old trope from the last time California was burning from wildfires- It's California's fault for not cleaning the forest floors, despite the fact that the US Forest Service is a federal organization. And they're not to blame, either. Anyone with two neurons to rub together knows the drought facing the southern and western states is a result of climate change, of which the Trump administration has also done little if anything to address (See Climate Accord, Paris).
     And even the most apolitical, cursory news consumer can make a persuasive case that 2020 is shaping up to be quite possibly the worst year in American history or certainly one of them. There are wildfires literally burning up the west coast. We've had tornado warnings in places that never see tornadoes. We've had inland hurricanes. We now have a new plague called COVID-19, the viral endgame of coronavirus.
     Now, as a result of having to shutter businesses, over 50,000,000 are out of work, producing an unemployment rate that's been unseen since the Great Depression. In the backdrop of all this, lawmakers and policy makers seem to be more willing to commit ritual seppuku then help out the average American after begrudgingly giving them a onetime $1200 stimulus check and very short-term unemployment extensions and eviction protection. And that was last spring with absolutely no followup whatsoever.
     So, what are we doing about all this? Collectively, we're the proverbial frog in boiling water, getting more and more acclimated to the rising water temperature until we realize we're being boiled alive. And with our intellectual weakening grasp on reality and the facts, we're slowly dooming ourselves to a watery, painful death.
     Two days ago in The Atlantic, Ed Yong wrote an article about our "pandemic spiral." And this one paragraph neatly summed up the thrust of his article (this is a snippet of his interview with anthropologist Martha Lincoln):

“It’s like mass gaslighting. We were put in a situation where better solutions were closed off but a lot of people had that fact sneak up on them. In the absence of a robust federal response, we’re all left washing our hands and hoping for the best, which makes us more susceptible to magical thinking and individual-level fixes.” And if those fixes never come, “I think people are going to harden into a fatalistic sense that we have to accept whatever the risks are to continue with our everyday lives.”

     My recent research into the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-20 (It's in the background in the latter chapters of my work in progress, Hollywoodland) informed me that decades before gaslighting even became a word, the same disinformation was being waged by the four largest governments in the Great War effort. France, Great Britain and the United States, the three great allied war powers that would team up again less than 25 years later for WWII, were deliberately playing down the virus both on the battlefield and at home and were able to do it with the patriotic cooperation of the international press.
     It was the one thing with which the Allied powers had in common with Germany, which also did the same thing. The rationale was eerily similar to Trump's: They didn't want to tamp down soldier morale and enthusiasm for the war. The reason the Spanish Flu is still called that to this day was because the press was "allowed" to report on the virus' effect in Spain, which was neutral in WWI, especially after it had killed their king. Who cared that it likely originated in or near Fort Riley, Kansas, a military training facility that would send the first American troops to the battlefields of France and Belgium, hence unhelpfully importing the disease to Western Europe then eventually all over the planet?
     But while a global war may have been a convenient cover for a global pandemic back then, we are not at war now for this one. There is no fig leaf that excuses Trump for knowing the facts about this disease that's killed 66 times the number of human beings killed on 9/11 then keeping the truth and the facts from the American public. And then saying he refrained from telling us about the growing light at the end of the tunnel because he didn't want to "panic" us. Yet any real leader, of which Trump is not, would find a way to tell us we're facing a life or death challenge without panicking the populace.
     So what are we doing about this? When is the frog going to jump out of the water? Or is it too late already?
     Since the start of our history, America has struggled against the dichotomy between cohesiveness in the name of social need with rugged individualism. There's something uniquely American, one clung to by a growing number of those who look upon this perverted, distorted view of rugged individualism as if it was a fetish about going it alone, including disobeying the government once it begins to diverge from an individual's belief system. We as a nation may have dutifully worn cloth masks to keep ourselves and others alive 100 years ago but there were still factions that had resisted doing so. I give you the Anti-Mask League of San Francisco.
     Ergo, what are our options for getting out of this mess?
     Obviously, there are no fast or easy solutions nor should we expect one to exist that'll successfully counterbalance decades of corruption and neglect. It being an election year, we always default to the ballot box. But if voter turnout will be low this year, at least it has the pandemic and Louis DeJoy's criminal slowdown of the postal service to provide us with a rare fig leaf of our own for a low turnout. But getting rid of Donald Trump and the swamp that he's enlarged to cartoonish proportions will not get rid of the virus. It will not put out the fires in California, Oregon or elsewhere. It will not suddenly make people less racist, less violent, less anti-government, make the police kinder and more compassionate.
     It's not Donald Trump's fault that any of these things are literally and figuratively plaguing our nation. All we can blame him for is his corrupt or non-existent response to these problems, in ignoring them or inflaming them to unbearable levels. The president runs a single branch of government. A nation is run by a people and the rest is up to us through collective action, even activism. In other words, the alternative to selfish, Randian individualism- Social mobilization for the common good.
     But Americans also have a strange predisposition for acclimating themselves to the unbearable and untenable. As Anne Helen Peterson said in her latest newsletter,

In short: we acclimate. We decide this is just the way things are, and that the number of deaths — in our community, in our country, in our world — is acceptable, because if it were unacceptable, wouldn’t we be expected to act differently? Wouldn’t we ask our elected officials to behave differently? Wouldn’t we fight until it was acceptable again? But we’re too exhausted for that.

     As I'd said in a previous article several months ago, before the pandemic hit, you'd be hard-pressed to find a single American who was still waiting for the pre-9/11 normal to come back. That ship had sailed long ago. Bush had told us we needed to forgo our freedoms and civil liberties in order to keep ourselves safer and we meekly acquiesced. "Well, if it'll make us safer," we murmured as armed guards, security staff and cops demanded we turn our bags inside out at sports stadiums and court houses, our kids silently passed through metal detectors at school and we bowed our heads and took it when told we needed to submit to body searches, X-Ray scans and to take off our shoes at the airport.
     And, ironically, when state officials tell us to wear a mask during an epidemic that's killed 200,000, suddenly we become rugged individualists who refuse to bow to government coercion.
     So, the new normal will supplant the old pre-pandemic normal, make no mistake about that. Plagues and pandemics have a habit of changing human behavior in subtle as well as not-so-subtle ways. But that doesn't mean we have to accept a horrible new normal that doesn't have to be tolerated.
     I'm reminded time and again of the illuminating dialogue between Professor Barnhardt (John Cleese) and Klatuu in the 2008 remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still. Klatuu (Keanu Reeves) is telling the professor that humankind is doomed and that its destruction is the only answer. Professor Barnhardt replies:
     "Well that's where we are. You say we're on the brink of destruction and you're right. But it's only on the brink that people find the will to change. Only at the precipice do we evolve. This is our moment. Don't take it from us, we are close to an answer."
     We are close to an answer. It doesn't feel like it, yet.  Yet, rather than an alien hit man sent to earth to exterminate all humans as if we were the virus, if anyone will take from us our last ditch opportunity at salvation, it'll, sadly, be us.
     So let's not let that happen.