War of The Worlds Redux

By Susan Bergeron

October 2: The President of the United States has been infected with the Covid-19 virus. Forgive me, but the horrors of the past four years have caused me to lose just enough of my humanity to be able to say I find it impossible to feel sorry for him. It would be a lie. Accuse me of schadenfreude and I won't argue with you. I admit this is not a flattering reaction to any person getting a deadly illness, but he once called it a hoax. He lied to the American people about the seriousness of it when he knew all along how deadly it was. If Hitler had caught TB or some other deadly debilitating illness would it have been OK to say the same? No difference.

In H.G. Wells’ classic novel "War of the Worlds" an alien species invades the earth in an attempt to kill us all and suck us dry of all our resources, apparently having exhausted their own from the world they came from. The evil monsters, impervious to any of our defenses, are capable of blasting our deadliest weapons, along with our military, into oblivion using their laser beams, turning everything, they come in contact with into ashes. It seems the earth is doomed. Until miraculously, one day, without any provocation, without any weaponry, without any military intervention, one by one the evil creatures begin to fall to the ground and perish for no apparent reason. What destroyed them? It is discovered that it was a tiny little germ that they were defenseless against---a novel virus. They had no immunity to it as the germ did not exist in their world.  

On September 30th, during the most embarrassing, uncivilized political debate in American history, Trump made a joke of and tried to shame his opponent Joe Biden for always wearing masks in public. Who's laughing now?

Trump's willful negligence and sheer incompetence is responsible for the unnecessary deaths of at least over 100, 000 people that we know of.  Think about that. We know that many, many more souls have perished because of Covid-19 but they were not counted because they died at home or before they could be tested. Scientists tell us 60,000 to 100,000 people probably would have died even with mitigation before the U.S. could have gotten the virus under control. Admittedly, Trump cannot be blamed for all the deaths and sickness from Covid-19. And the seven million people sickened by the virus here in the U.S? It's probably closer to thirty-five million say some experts. We are heading toward repeating the terrible numbers that were the pandemic of 1918-1920, one of the worst pandemics in recorded history. And yet, Trump continued on with his mega-superspreader rallies from coast to coast and continued to spread more disinformation than any other source, say health experts. He derided Joe Biden for "hiding in his basement in Delaware" when VP Biden was demonstrating responsible behavior by observing the rules of social distancing to Americans by choosing TV and digital broadcasting over live rallies that might harm attendees. No, I don't have any sympathy for Trump the Killer.

I have been a devoted member of the Biden for President campaign since April 2019. By late March of 2020, after WHO declared that a Global Pandemic was upon us, the campaign workers were all taken off the road and the Biden campaign went digital, even inventing the first ever virtual political convention. It was hard to take and very depressing to have the rug yanked out from under us like that. But we knew one thing was crystal clear: VP Biden had our backs and he had the backs of the American people, as he always will. We knew the primaries would have to switch to mail-in, there would be no more rallies, and no canvassing. It was heartbreaking not to be able to have one-on-one contact with the voters. 

Trump did not do any such thing. His selfish need to win re-election at ALL costs meant gas-lighting the American public into believing this deadly virus, that is on track to kill almost half a million Americans by the new year, would simply "go away" and that he had it "very nicely under control." Open up the country! became his new battle cry as he paved the way to start up the rallies that he knew would fuel his rabid cult followers, who like lemmings, would follow him right over a cliff. 

We tried to stop Trump from killing us, using every weapon at our disposal. We tried impeachment, truth, justice, science, the courts, the rule of law. But he beat us down at every turn, a Teflon monster indestructible as the monsters of George Orwell's novel. Attack of the Fifty Foot Trump! A craven orange faced beast capable of hypnotizing millions and bending them to his will, The Trump stomped his way across America killing and killing. And in the end, what is it that history will have shown to be the thing to have brought down this killing machine and finally saved humanity? A tiny little germ.