The Year in COVID

     

    If 2020 could be defined by any one thing, I think many of us would vote for COVID-19. Not even Trump's scores of nuisance lawsuits seeking to overturn the presidential election, while headline-grabbing now, will rob coronavirus and COVID from its time in the sun.

    Unlike most leap years, the presidential election and the Olympics will not define this year. Leap Year has traditionally been the time when often the nation would come together and welcome a new president, the honeymoon period begins, the smooth transfer of power gets ossified into history and the nation begins a new path forward.

    But Donald Trump took care of all that and COVID-19 took care of the Olympics. And, for that matter, the MLB, NHL and NBA seasons.

     In this nightmarish year, everything was turned on its ear and things we could take for granted like buying toilet paper and spring water, having an uncontested election and smooth transfer of power, we found to our alarm we could no longer take for granted. The Republican Party is acting like a bunch of children but children with a lot of power. They're refusing to admit Joe Biden won the election, even to the point of denying him his inauguration even though they finished building the stage for it weeks ago.

     And now the (indicted) Attorney General of Texas, Ken Paxton, who's plainly angling for a pardon, is filing a lawsuit into which Trump had personally insinuated himself by petitioning the Supreme Court yesterday, demanding that four states (Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia) essentially override the will and voice of their people because Paxton, and Trump, didn't like the outcome. That nuisance lawsuit of Paxton's has now been joined by 18 other red states and, while nearly all legal scholars predict it's doomed as was 53 of Trump's other lawsuits, it's shaping up to be the Civil War and the 1876 election if it was re-enacted by an army of rodeo clowns.

    At the same time Trump was petitioning the Supreme Court, with a reference to not the 1876 election but the 1860 election that Abraham Lincoln legally and legitimately won, the nation set new records in both coronavirus cases and deaths. Of course, Trump's language in his super-sized tweet to the Supreme Court deliberately brought up images of the Civil War that had begun in 1861 barely after Lincoln took his hand off the Bible at his Inauguration.

   Civil War. After a legal election with no evidence of widespread fraud, with identical Electoral College results as 2016 (each winner got 306. Four years ago, Trump called it a landslide) and in which the winner won by over 7,000,000 votes.

     But yesterday, the virus insisted on sneaking into the headlines as it often does. While Trump and his flaks and hacks were screaming about voter fraud, the nation lost a record number of Americans. While Trump was thinking, as usual, about just himself, we lost anywhere between 3054 and 3124 American citizens.

    By today, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts ruled that Gov. Charlie Baker did not overstep his legal bounds as governor with his mitigation efforts to combat the virus. That's right. He was sued by a bunch of right wing shop owners who were angry that he tried to save lives. Republicans sued their own Republican governor for doing the responsible things.

     Here in Massachusetts, we've already lost nearly 11,000 of our citizens. Governor Charlie Baker has had a mask mandate in place since May 6th. He has since rolled back Phase 3 step one plans for reopening and did it all under the Commonwealth's Civil Defense Act. Yet we're still, like all the 49 other states, seeing a surge in cases, in deaths. My county, Middlesex, is still the hardest hit of all 14 of our counties. That includes Suffolk County, where Boston is (and with their population of 803,907). Statewide, we're seeing over 6000 cases each day.

     That's right. We're (most of us, anyway) doing all the right things and are still getting sick and dying. You cannot walk into a public building such as a convenience store and buy a stick of gum without wearing a mask. Let me put it in starker terms.

     Last spring, my son Jake, who works at the local hospital in neighboring Marlborough, told me the hospital had commandeered the ER's waiting room and turned it into makeshift hospital rooms. He warned me, "Dad, don't go to the ER unless you're totally fucked up." He's surrounded by the virus every minute he's at work. They check his temperature every day he goes to work but that means nothing if he's asymptomatic. They test him regularly (I hope) but negative results are only good for 24 hours.

    I'm a father, so you're damned right I'm scared shitless for my little boy's life (He's 25 but, if you're a parent yourself, you'll understand completely why I still think of my youngest son as my little boy). I haven't seen him since last summer when he briefly came by to drop off masks. He was masked and gloved. We rubbed elbows instead of hugging like we used to then he was gone. I haven't seen him since. Forget about Christmas.

    This is scary, to put it very mildly. Our hard-hit state's hardest-hit county is Middlesex, our county, and he's working at Ground Zero in the Bay State. The next town north, my town of Hudson, is one of 97 communities that have been designated as a "red zone" community, an unwelcome distinction we've had since before Halloween.

    And yet, while up to 3124 Americans had died or were in the process of dying, Trump held a maskless Hanukkah party with no social distancing observed at the White House yesterday and, instead of sticking to the Jewish end of the year holiday, made it all about himself. He boasted that "a Jewish miracle" would pull out the election for him. The attendees responded with full-throated cheers of "Four More Years!" as better than two Americans a minute died of the virus yesterday. Politicians typically see everything through a political prism but that was low even for Trump.

   What I cannot understand is, we'd lost about 2977 people on 9/11. It changed our culture, our government, our very psychological makeup. Taking full advantage of this emergency brought about by his typically Republican inattentiveness, Bush took away our civil liberties and we gladly let him have them while weakly mumbling, "Well, if it keeps us safer..."

     Where is this concern for our lives now that we're in a newer, deadlier phase of this pandemic that's killing better than 2977 each day? We've gone from, "Please save us, Mr. President, please keep us safe!" to overgrown children having tantrums about being asked to wear a mask for the public good. Defiant bar owners are keeping their establishments open without any heed as to how much danger to which they're exposing their staff and patrons. One of them even ran over a cop on Staten Island and put him in the hospital.

     Republican governors are getting sued or threatened with lawsuits by self-interested parties who do not care how many people they kill. There was a plot on Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer's life in which a self-styled militia was going to kidnap her, decapitate her and on live TV then burn down the state house in Lansing at full occupancy. Trump shrugged and said, "Maybe they were a problem, maybe they weren't" while the sheriff of Barry County, MI, Dar Leaf (who filed another nuisance lawsuit on Trump's behalf that crashed and burned) had last October brushed off an assassination and arson conspiracy that looked like a Three Stooges version of the Gunpowder Plot, as concerned citizens simply making a citizen's arrest.

    Meanwhile, right wingers are screaming about the nonexistent threat of antifa and Black Lives Matter. The same right wingers who always preach about "states' rights" while launching a massive lawsuit to overturn an election in four states and shitting all over their states' rights.

     Donald Trump didn't create this scary state of affairs but he certainly exploited then inflamed it with his never-ending litany of white grievance. It's difficult to see how we will fully recover from this poisoning of the electoral process, this racism and political division. We'd survived two World Wars and countless police actions. We'd survived a terrorist attack and we will survive this pandemic as our ancestors had a century ago. I just don't know how. Maybe the vaccines will do the trick, maybe they won't.

    1918 was defined by the final year of the Great War, as it was then called, and the outbreak of the Spanish Flu.

    2020 will be defined as the year of the coronavirus pandemic and a needless Civil War over an election process that, just four years ago, was never in serious doubt.