America Embraces Evil. Full Stop.
May. 17th, 2020 07:36 pmPresident Trump is contemplating withdrawing the United States from the World Health Organization permanently. This is an abandonment of responsibility and an embrace of evil as profound as any in history.
In 1979 the World Health Organization (WHO) announced that there had been no new cases of smallpox anywhere in the world. Time magazine ran an article about the great work the WHO, led by the United States, drove smallpox to extinction.
In that classic breathless tone of government doing great things, Time described how teams around the world were primed with refrigerators full of the vaccine. When an outbreak occurred, the teams would vaccinate everyone in a hundred-kilometer radius. No exceptions.
From 1974 through 1978, this effort went on tirelessly, well-funded by the wealthy nations of the world. Smallpox, it was understood, was a deadly, crippling, disfiguring diseases that destroyed families, nations, and economies.
Those teams were specialized. Often, like firefighters, they had long stretches of time with nothing to do. But the UN and the G7 funded them because they understood that their specialization was rare and important and could not be used in other ways.
That same year, 1979, even as the world's governments banded together and celebrated the end of smallpox, Ronald Reagan announced, "Government is not the solution to our problems. Government is the problem."
In the forty years since 1980, successive presidents have dismantled our disease control infrastructure. In the name of "the market" and "freedom," they've allowed anti-vaccination nonsense to go unchallenged, and discouraged the US to keep up with other nations' successes.
That effort culminated in Donald Trump, who dismissed the US Global Health Biodefence Unit, apparently because it was a successful effort by Barack Obama to restart the US's leadership on the management of novel disease outbreaks.
Trump said he could just rehire those people if he needed them. Those people had rare specialities; they're not like construction contractors, of which there have apparently been plenty for him to stiff over the decades.
You cannot "just in time" a pandemic response team.
Meanwhile, the United States has suffered an internal breakdown as millions of people reject vaccination as a valid preventative therapy, a breakdown fueled by hucksters and by hostile foreign powers who actively admit weakening the United States is their goal.
Between the Trump impulse to loot the US government, the utter vetocracy of our legislative process, the embedding of a full-on adversarial attitude toward governing at all, the embrace of a vicious social Spencerism (not "Darwinism") at the top, the hollowing out of the American education system, the abandonment of modern medicine, and the ongoing rise of fascist impulses committed to undoing the legacy of our first black President, America is dysfunctional and, I fear, beyond redemption.
In 1979 the World Health Organization (WHO) announced that there had been no new cases of smallpox anywhere in the world. Time magazine ran an article about the great work the WHO, led by the United States, drove smallpox to extinction.
In that classic breathless tone of government doing great things, Time described how teams around the world were primed with refrigerators full of the vaccine. When an outbreak occurred, the teams would vaccinate everyone in a hundred-kilometer radius. No exceptions.
From 1974 through 1978, this effort went on tirelessly, well-funded by the wealthy nations of the world. Smallpox, it was understood, was a deadly, crippling, disfiguring diseases that destroyed families, nations, and economies.
Those teams were specialized. Often, like firefighters, they had long stretches of time with nothing to do. But the UN and the G7 funded them because they understood that their specialization was rare and important and could not be used in other ways.
That same year, 1979, even as the world's governments banded together and celebrated the end of smallpox, Ronald Reagan announced, "Government is not the solution to our problems. Government is the problem."
In the forty years since 1980, successive presidents have dismantled our disease control infrastructure. In the name of "the market" and "freedom," they've allowed anti-vaccination nonsense to go unchallenged, and discouraged the US to keep up with other nations' successes.
That effort culminated in Donald Trump, who dismissed the US Global Health Biodefence Unit, apparently because it was a successful effort by Barack Obama to restart the US's leadership on the management of novel disease outbreaks.
Trump said he could just rehire those people if he needed them. Those people had rare specialities; they're not like construction contractors, of which there have apparently been plenty for him to stiff over the decades.
You cannot "just in time" a pandemic response team.
Meanwhile, the United States has suffered an internal breakdown as millions of people reject vaccination as a valid preventative therapy, a breakdown fueled by hucksters and by hostile foreign powers who actively admit weakening the United States is their goal.
Between the Trump impulse to loot the US government, the utter vetocracy of our legislative process, the embedding of a full-on adversarial attitude toward governing at all, the embrace of a vicious social Spencerism (not "Darwinism") at the top, the hollowing out of the American education system, the abandonment of modern medicine, and the ongoing rise of fascist impulses committed to undoing the legacy of our first black President, America is dysfunctional and, I fear, beyond redemption.
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