Hispanic Fanatic

With luck, this will be the last time I write about Covid-19. 

You see, some experts believe that we may finally be nearing the end of this wretched, soul-crushing, nation-defiling pandemic. That means no more news stories about thousands of Americans dying daily, no more anti-maskers punching people out, and no more Facebook posts about robots in your bloodstream (ok, that last one will probably stick around).

Of course, this doesn’t mean that the virus will magically go away. Hey, it was supposed to do that 18 months ago.

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Conservatives don’t like carrots. And it’s not just because they hate vegans, or that metaphorically, they like being thrown red meat.

No, it’s because when deciding between the carrot or the stick, conservatives will choose the stick every time. And not just for themselves, but for you and me as well. It’s stick stick stick nonstop.

For example, progressives have begged conservatives for months now to get the vaccine, appealing to their sense of reason, patriotism, and compassion for others. We have offered them money, nodded respectfully when they spewed conspiratorial nonsense, and presented heart-wrenching stories of right-wingers on their death beds who regretted their anti-vaxx stance (and there have been a lot of those guys).

Their response has been to scream in our faces, move the goal posts yet again, and chug horse medicine.

The message is clear: Being nice to conservatives doesn’t work.

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There’s an iron law in politics: Regardless of the actual reason for a crisis, Republicans will always blame immigrants.

Yes, as we all know, the GOP leaders of Florida could not unleash more death upon their state if they hired snipers to shoot at random cars on the freeway. But they deny that their disdain for vaccines and refusal to mask up has, in any way, led to the completely predictable and totally preventable surge of the delta variant that is consuming their residents.

No, according to the GOP, it is once again all those filthy Hispanics swarming across the border (and then presumably swimming across the Gulf of Mexico) that are infesting the brave patriots of Florida.

This pathetic deflection is typical of a political party that has to come up with increasingly ludicrous excuses for being so obviously, painfully, and catastrophically wrong about the coronavirus. They are furiously scrambling to come up with yet more convoluted explanations of how two plus two equals nine. We can practically hear the self-doubt and see the flop sweat.

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Just over one year ago, the United States suffered its first known Covid-19 death. At the time, many scientific experts were concerned that a pandemic would erupt, killing hundreds of thousands of Americans.

Those experts were pretty much ignored, in favor of just wishing that the virus would magically go away.

And now here we are, 12 months later, with no pandemic problems whatsoever (as long as we don’t count the 450,000 dead Americans).

Hey, what do those egghead “experts” know, right?

In any case, it’s worth noting that while the coronavirus doesn’t care who it infects, we Americans most certainly do. And our top priority is ensuring that affluent White people do not get sick.

But Covid-19 can devastate entire Latino communities without Americans getting upset about it. We know this is true because that’s exactly what has happened.

Coronavirus hospitalization rates for Latinos are more than quadruple the rate among Whites, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and “in almost every state in the nation, the number of Latinos affected by the disease is higher” than their percentage of the population.

Furthermore, Hispanics get infected at a higher rate than other groups and often suffer worse effects. This is because, for starters, we are more likely to have underlying health issues, and less likely to have health insurance.

But it is also because Latinos often work in jobs that potentially put us at risk. And yes, many of those jobs are on the fabled frontline.

This is especially true among the undocumented. In fact, “more than two-thirds of undocumented immigrant workers have frontline jobs considered ‘essential’ to the U.S. fight against Covid-19.” And nearly one million essential workers are Dreamers protected by Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA).

So if you’re keeping track, Latino immigrants are keeping the country afloat, and putting themselves at enormous risk to do so, in exchange for being demonized, threatened, and blamed for all of the nation’s problems.

Sweet deal, huh?

It would be nice, of course, if the country acknowledged the huge debt that it owes to Latinos. But many Americans are too busy shouting slurs at us, or calling 911 over minor slights, or just cheering on ICE raids. So they haven’t gotten around to writing out the thank-you notes yet.

Maybe they’ll be more grateful during the next pandemic, when no doubt, Latinos will once again be tasked with rescuing a nation that hates them.

And speaking of the next viral outbreak, remember in the early days of coronavirus, when many people said that diseases like SARS and bird flu seemed like a test run?

Well, it’s quite possible that SARS and H1N1 were not warnings about Covid-19. It may be that Covid-19 is itself a warning of something much worse to come in the future.

Next time, I wonder if we’ll listen to the experts.

When this horrific era of death and isolation and lockdowns and screaming men with guns and infinitely long Zoom meetings finally ends, I know the phrase that will encapsulate it for me:

“Can I please share?”

That’s what my seven-year-old son says approximately 3,862 times a day. He yells this while he is in his remote-learning class, when he is one of two dozen second graders vying for the teacher’s attention.

“Can I please share?” he will shout while waving his artwork or math sheet or grammar lesson at the computer screen. Of course, many of the other kids in the class also want to share their work, or just be the first one to give the right answer. So they all start shouting, “Can I please share?” or “I want to share” or “It’s my turn to share.”

And then it turns into an online Lord of the Flies, but with arguments about adverbs and improper fractions.

In any case, I’m grateful that my son is doing ok in his virtual classroom. Because the same cannot be said about many American kids.

Although early studies of online learning indicate that “the Covid-19 pandemic and the learning disruptions it caused have been less detrimental than researchers had expected,” it could be years before we know “the true educational toll of the pandemic — and the effects could be long-lasting.”

And we know that for many “Black and Hispanic students, as well as those in schools that serve low-income populations, the situation is more concerning — with marginalized students falling further behind in reading and math.”

This, of course, means that the educational gap between ethnic minority children and White kids is only widening.

Now, that’s grim news, to be sure. But hey, won’t everything get back to “normal” after all those kids get vaccinated and return to the classroom?

Well, this presupposes that Black and Latino kids get vaccinated at the same rate as White kids. And the truth is that “America’s history of racism in medical research and a lack of trust in the federal government is making some Black Americans and Latinos hesitant to take the vaccine.”

It’s almost like the Tuskegee experiments, the forced sterilization of Latinas, and the unethical testing of procedures “that caused health complications or death” have left ethnic minorities distrustful of the medical establishment.

I mean, what are the odds?

Currently, only 14% of Black Americans trust that a coronavirus vaccine will be safe. Latinos are more optimistic, with 34% saying they trust the vaccine to be safe. But compare that to the 61% of White people who are eager to be vaccinated.

The result is that “vaccine hesitancy could result in some Black and Latino Americans not being vaccinated as Covid-19 continues to batter their communities at disproportionate rates.”

Latinos have the additional burden of being fearful of the government, which is something that just sort of happens when a president spends his entire term demonizing Hispanics. Indeed, the Trump Administration’s “anti-immigration policies, public charge rules that create barriers to citizenship, and threats to the Affordable Care Act have made some Latino families reluctant to receive healthcare.”

As a final handicap, keep in mind that many ethnic minorities live “in poor and urban neighborhoods that don’t have doctors or healthcare facilities near their homes.”

So we have a situation where Black and Latino kids are suffering the most from the pandemic, and are the least likely to come out of it quickly.

For those kids, it will 2020 for years to come.

In theory, by this time next year we will all be vaccinated against COVID-19. And then we’ll hug and clap hands and laugh about the silly virus.

“That whole killer pandemic thing,” we will chortle. “What was that all about anyway?”

Well, before we banish the coronavirus and the entirety of 2020 into the deep, dark memory hole where we bury all our unpleasant thoughts, let’s take a moment to acknowledge the here and now.

You see, because of the Trump Administration’s unique combination of incompetence, hubris, idiocy, and depraved indifference, we are now at about 14 million Americans infected, with over 270,000 dead. We are seeing higher numbers of death on a daily basis, and soon we will endure the equivalent of “a 9/11 every single day.”

In response, the administration has fluctuated between doing nothing, embracing denialism, promoting quackery, and dismissing the experts, which is “in keeping with their guiding philosophy that there is no problem so great that it cannot be solved by knowing lessa bout it.”

Of course, this is not a recent collapse. Months ago, the administration basically gave up fighting the virus and hoped that “Americans will go numb to the escalating death toll and learn to accept tens of thousands of new cases a day.”

And that’s pretty much what conservatives have done. Hey, over half (52%) of Republicans believe that “the U.S. reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic is overblown,” which is double the percentage of Democrats who think the same thing.

So if you’re in the GOP, overflowing hospitals and widespread death is no reason to get all excited. This is despite the fact that “only cancer and heart disease will kill more Americans this year” than coronavirus. In fact, the bug has already “killed more than twice as many Americans as either strokes or Alzheimer’s disease, about four times as many as diabetes, and more than eight times as many as either gun violence or vehicle accidents.”

Again, none of that is reason to be concerned — if you’re a Republican.

If you are not, and you actually respect science, you might be interested to know that recent studies verify “what health officials have been telling us for months: Masks do work by significantly slowing the spread of COVID-19.” In fact, there may be up to “a 50% reduction in the spread of COVID-19 in counties that had a mask mandate compared to those without.”

But of course, our disease-ridden president mocked facemasks for months, and provoked the stupidest culture war of all time, apparently because masks weren’t manly or would hurt the economy or something similarly incoherent.

Oh, and speaking of Republicans and their favorite subject — the economy — keep in mind that mask mandates lead to “greater confidence and spending among consumers,” and “are also linked to higher consumer mobility.”

So if conservatives really wanted to rescue the economy, and not just kill grandma in a futile ploy to boost Wall Street, they would be clamoring for everyone to wear a mask. Also, the conservative insistence that lockdowns would destroy the economy looks even more pathetic now, considering that most economists say “the U.S. would be in a better economic position now if lockdowns had been more aggressive at the beginning of the crisis.”

In essence, the Trumpian approach killed more people and made the economy worse — a win-win only if you are a delusional Republican or a cackling demon from the underworld who loves human suffering.

Yes, the virus was always going to be bad, but this level of calamity is the direct result of an infantile, self-obsessed president and his “incessant destruction of reason, evidence and science in the service of his personal whims, conspiratorial mindset and political requirements.”

In future generations, there will be myriad books, documentaries, and feature films about American life during coronavirus. And they will all come to the same conclusion:

It didn’t have to be this bad. 

If there is one thing that a corrupt president, a neo-fascist political party, and several thousand gun-toting protesters know, it’s that the simple act of saying you can now get a haircut will cause our economy to rebound so quickly that every citizen will get prosperity whiplash. Just like that — no more Great Depression 2!

Oh, and also, the virus has been defeated, and only a few disposable people will die from this point on, so don’t concern yourself with them.

Yes, the same individuals who told you that we would be welcome as liberators, that the glaciers aren’t melting, and that job creators will trickle down their cash are now insisting that opening up restaurants will cure our financial ills — even though a lot of economists agree that many Americans remain too terrified to mingle in crowds, which would thwart any economic improvement, and every serious epidemiologist has said that opening up now only ensures more death and misery from Covid-19.

But who are you going to believe? Esteemed scientists from top institutions with access to the latest data and sophisticated predictive models? Or a guy who says gurgling bleach is good for you? 

I think the answer is obvious.

Now, to be fair, there are coherent arguments for considering a slow, phased-in reopening for some parts of the country. And one can even disagree — to a point — about the lethality of Covid-19, the effectiveness of face masks, and the constitutionality of lockdown orders.

But we’re not hearing the reasonable arguments that conservatives could have made. Instead we are hearing from ferocious right-wingers who insist that 70,000 deaths is no big deal, that social distancing is a myth, and that patriotic behavior consists of screaming obscenities into a cop’s face from one inch away (guess that whole Blue Lives Matter movement is done).

Soon, we will hear Fox News shriek that washing your hands is un-American. After that, it’s just a matter of time before a gang of bellicose conservatives burst into a New York City ICU ward and lick all the ventilators (just to own the libs).

In essence, we can’t have a rational discussion of how to reopen the nation if one side says, “Let’s look at the science,” and the other side says, “It’s all lies! Sacrifice the weak!”

Furthermore, there will be no limit to the madness, no turning point where hardcore Trump supporters will abruptly say, “Enough.”

Yes, imagine the following worst-case scenario: 

Over 2 million Americans die. Unemployment hits record levels. Chaos engulfs the nation. 

Even with all that, 40% of Americans would still vote for Trump and insist that liberals are out to destroy America.

To understand this, keep in mind that just as the virus took years to evolve and mutate in order to spark a pandemic, the GOP took decades to arrive at this moment, when Republicans openly dismiss “scientific merit and expert recommendations and instead award lucrative contracts based on political connections and cronyism.”

You see, the Republican Party has, “dating back to Ronald Reagan, attacked the very ideas of the common good and mutual obligation, equating the idea of success with violent, personal sacrifice.”

For the modern GOP, the noblest thing you can do is die for a corporation, and the most evil concept in the world is the idea of societal benefit.

As a result, there is no conspiracy too insane, no rationalization too idiotic, no pivot too jarring, and no excuse too pathetic that will prevent hardcore conservatives from shouting that progressives are scheming to steal our freedom.

So where does that leave us?

Exactly here, in this nation where millions of citizens honestly believe that doctors and nurses who risk their lives working to save Americans are, in actuality, opportunistic villains or brainwashed stooges.

Personally, I look forward to watching Fox News in October, when their commentators will insist that the reports of our societal collapse are exaggerated. They will tell us to pay no attention to the rampaging hordes outside our bedroom windows, and they will opine that liberals won’t tell you that Lord Humungus is actually a really great guy.

And much of America will believe them.

Throughout history, people have been willing to die for only a handful of ideals. These include the following: 

Family

Country

God

Freedom

And to that brief list, we can now add “gross domestic product.”

Yes, our old friends in the GOP have clearly stated what they’ve only hinted at before, which is that nothing — not even human life — is as precious as money.

You see, the Republican lieutenant governor of Texas, Dan Patrick, recently implied that all this social distancing is absurd, because the economy is suffering. Patrick said Americans should be “willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren.”

Of course, “the America that all America loves” is a nation where people live from paycheck to paycheck, don’t have basic healthcare, and cower in fear of their rich overlords, who feel entitled to work them to death. But those are just details. The point is that we should all be honored to collapse in the streets if it means the Dow Jones goes into a bull market.

Now, you might think that literally killing yourself just to keep the unemployment rate low is not exactly a noble demise. That’s where you’re wrong.

Because our president, that most stable of geniuses, is shrieking that economic malaise will eat you and your grandma if we don’t get back to the office soon. Trump has declared that he “wants the nation ‘opened up and just raring to go by Easter’ — a date just more than two weeks away that few health experts believe will be sufficient in containing the spread of coronavirus.”

Trump is making this demand — which is completely unenforceable, by the way — because he is concerned that if people stay at home much longer, the Great Depression II will explode and sink his odds of being reelected.

That would be strange, considering that the media insisted “economic anxiety” was the main reason poor white people voted for Trump in the first place. If that was true in 2016, they will be even happier to vote for him in 2020, when they will be even more economically anxious, right?

Right?

Ahem.

In any case, there is absolutely no evidence that ending the lockdowns and throwing open the doors of every store in America will actually prevent a recession. In fact, many experts believe that rushing back to our crowded, elbow-bumping lifestyles will only backfire and that “the fallout will be worse if the White House declares victory now, only to have the virus resurface in coming weeks or months.”

But hey, it’s worth a shot, isn’t it? After all, the only risk is driving up the death rate of Covid-19 until it reaches genocidal levels. And considering those extra victims will be mostly old people who aren’t contributing to the bottom line anyway, it’s obviously time to shout, “We’re back in business, baby!”

Hey, we might as well circle “an arbitrary date on the calendar and decide that, on that day, everything is going to be fine.”

Now, as powerful as the drive to post record profits is, there remains yet another reason why conservatives see no need to isolate ourselves when we could be out in public, shopping and drinking and coughing in each other’s faces.

And it is this:

We are exceptional.

I mean, we’ve certainly heard it enough over the past few decades. Americans are the best, the greatest, the smartest, the strongest, the purest, the biggest, the baddest, and in general, the most likely to crush adversity in our giant, super-patriotic hands. This is American exceptionalism.

But there is one tiny issue with this viewpoint, which is that “American exceptionalism — like its machismo requires that we believe, even against the testimony of experts and the evidence of our own eyes, that the ‘greatness’ of America is eternal and invulnerable.”

We believe our standard of living is the best, when every statistic shows that it is not. We believe our kids are the brightest, even though the other industrialized nations kick our ass in education. And we believe that we have the “greatest healthcare system in the world,” which has never been remotely true, and is all the more glaring in its absurdity now that our hospitals are buckling under the strain of the coronavirus.

Despite these clear facts, we insist that our nation is the best (whatever that means) and “that the chief contribution citizens can make to American greatness is to act as if nothing is wrong.”

It is in our national character to bellow, in defiance of all proof, that we are blessed. Our default setting is to think that we are so favored by God, so intrinsically virtuous, and so insanely powerful that the only way we will catch Covid-19 is if we grab a fistful of viruses and lick them for ten minutes straight. Also, if you get sick, you probably didn’t work hard enough or pray the right way.

However, we should remember something before we dismiss all scientific and medical advice, and rush out into the world to show how tough we are.

You see, the virus “isn’t watching the bar-going hordes and thinking, ‘Wow, I really misjudged these brave Americans; I’m not sure I’m up to this.’”

Covid-19 isn’t intimidated by our resilience or courage or tenacity or whatever pretty adjective we use to describe reckless disregard for our fellow citizens. The virus is not impressed.

And the truth is that there is nothing exceptional about dropping dead.

One of my favorite novels is Stephen King’s The Stand. But that doesn’t mean I want to live it.

Yes, as we all know, the coronavirus is here to decimate our population, destroy our civilization, and in an absolute worst-case scenario, cause our millionaires to lose some money in the stock market.

Experts are still trying to figure out if this is the second coming of the Spanish Flu (which killed 5% of the world) or if it’s the most overhyped near-calamity since the Y2K bug.

But in any case, we shouldn’t worry. Because our mega-super genius of a president has a master plan to —

Ha, no.

As we all know, the odds of Trump handling this crisis well are about the same odds as your pet schnauzer winning the Kentucky Derby.

Even his hardcore supporters know that the guy can’t handle this. They elected the man to shake things up, or burn down the system, or undertake some other metaphor that conjures up images of devastation. Trump voters never dreamed that their beloved doddering reality-show host would actually have to deal with a national emergency. He was just supposed to ban the Muslims and deport the Latinos, not come up with a comprehensive approach to fighting a global pandemic. Oh, the injustice of it all.

Early indicators are that the most racist chief executive in history is not up to the task. After all, we’ve already endured disastrous news conferences where Trump has claimed that we will develop a vaccine for the coronavirus quickly, “when in fact there is little chance that will happen.” Hell, the president doesn’t even appear to know how vaccines work, and he’s implied that stricken people should just go into work and spread the disease among their co-workers.

So our prevention efforts are off to a good start.

Now, it’s not just that Trump distrusts science, “always believes he knows more than the experts about any given subject,” and “has increasingly surrounded himself with a team of acolytes who will not challenge him.”

No, there is also the fact that it is difficult “for the public to believe a president who has made more than 16,000 false or misleading claims in his first three years in office.” 

Put it all together, and there is a slight chance that the virus may yet accomplish what impeachment, the Mueller Report, and myriad scandals, fuck-ups, and immoral actions have not, which is to “throw a spotlight on the Trump administration’s criminal negligence,” massive corruption, and idiotic incompetence.

Hey, even Wall Street analysts are saying that a botched response to the virus “may increase the likelihood of Democratic victory in the 2020 election.”

But I will go even further. I will state the following:

This is the election. This microscopic bug — right here. This will likely decide who the next president is. We are in its hands.

You see, if coronavirus unleashes a wave of illness across America — and in a truly horrific scenario, kills thousands — it will be impossible for even Trump and his squad of conspiratorial lunatics to claim that it is fake news. If the stock market plummets, and the economy shudders, many Americans will finally declare that they have had enough of Trumpian chaos.

Conversely, if the virus burns itself out and doesn’t sicken too many Americans, and the economic turmoil is relatively slight, well then, team Trump will claim that the president vanquished the bug and singlehandedly saved the nation (even if, as is virtually 100 percent certain in this scenario, the administration just got lucky despite its inevitable bungling).

Everything that has come before this has just been set-up, politically speaking. This virus now controls our fate.

You can ponder the insanity of that all you want.

Just don’t forget to wash your hands.