Deadly Precision

One out of every 330 Americans has been infected and almost 60,000 have died as I write this. In three months. Those numbers have finally staggered me. Things have gotten a lot more real and personal for me as I watched the numbers rise with horrified eyes.

The great Gene Shay died, a virus victim. I knew Gene for going on fifty years and he was the most genuine and friendly legend you'd ever want to meet, but a legend he was in the folk community – and really in every musical community. His radio shows and the Philadelphia Folk Festival he created and nurtured were landmarks. 

My cousin and her husband were both mildly infected and they rode it out at home. I wouldn't have even known about it if her sister hadn't casually mentioned it in passing in an E-mail. She also said that her sister didn't even consider going to the hospital because “she worked in hospitals for 48 years and is terrified of them.”

I have friend who lives in lower Manhattan with his wife and son. He and I lost an old and dear friend to AIDS many years ago, which makes the heightened threat in New York from this virus so much more ironically worrisome, at least to me. He was near enough to the Twin Towers to have survived that danger when his son was young, and he is native New Yorker, which is an intangible. They are a strong family for these times. 

As I watched the stakes in this deadly roulette rise, I saw that the coronavirus works with the deadly precision of a true predator of nature. If there ever was a worthy and ready target it was and is the United States. We are the best host the world could produce, unprepared and arrogant, led by a sociopath who lives in a brooding and paranoid world that not even he can understand or control, and who wills thousands to their deaths in his thrashings and flailings against reality.

That reality now sees a citizenry that is strained almost to its limits physically, financially, and emotionally. Trump wants it all back – he is a murderous romantic – and he will open this country up as far and his fast as he can until the butcher 's bill comes due – which it inexorably will – beginning with the carnage that will result from the forced opening of the meat plants. 

Throw into this murky mix that the coronavirus will be back in the fall as sure as Donald Trump will be there to hand out the black lights and Clorox needles. If all too recent history is a sorry example, enough Americans won't be tested by then to appropriately fight the virus because the administration will be too busy with campaigning to follow up on all those grandiose promises.

America has nurtured within a significant portion of its people a sense of entitlement, as well, that is not ready for the strength of will needed by all America to see this through. Man up. Woman up.

We have to last until November 3.