Look to “Letters From An American”

 

When I began this blog it very quickly found its way into political matters.  Maybe it was the path of least resistance or the topic that most “needed” my opinion.  It led to my first book, Waiting for Someone To Explain It; The Rise of Contempt and the Decline of Sense.  Although I had to explain the mysterious title (Eugene Ionesco once wrote “as the world is incomprehensible to me, I am waiting for someone to explain it”), the subtitle, chosen during the reign of Trump, is self explanatory.

Over the years, my writing interests changed and, in fact, I became downright cynical trying to write about our increasingly fractious body politic and as divisive voices swelled I mostly withdrew from the conversation.  Also, writing in the COVID era became oppressive.  All the theatre and live music we loved disappeared, and these acrid politics leaked into public health, one exacerbating the other. 

Still there are topics I just cannot ignore and although I know little about Afghanistan, I know who to turn to and that is Heather Cox Richardson, a historian who set out, in a way like I did, to write a “journal.”  There are vast differences, though.  She approaches each topic in a scholarly fashion, documenting her opinions, and is extremely disciplined, writing each day on Substack in the form of an email to her subscribers.  It’s free unless you want to post comments.  I’ve come to rely on her analyses as a source of the facts behind the events. 

Richardson’ posting about August 26 (see the entire entry by subscribing with your email address) is a fully understandable discussion, to the point, of the quagmire called Afghanistan.  Here is the essence of her argument as she puts it:

I confess to being knocked off-keel by the Republican reaction to the Kabul bombing.

The roots of the U.S. withdrawal from its 20 years in Afghanistan were planted in February 2020, when the Trump administration cut a deal with the Taliban agreeing to release 5000 imprisoned Taliban fighters and to leave the country by May 1, 2021, so long as the Taliban did not kill any more Americans. The negotiations did not include the U.S.-backed Afghan government. By the time Biden took office, the U.S. had withdrawn all but 2500 troops from the country.

That left Biden with the option either to go back on Trump’s agreement or to follow through. To ignore the agreement would mean the Taliban would again begin attacking U.S. service people and the U.S. would both have to pour in significant numbers of troops and sustain casualties. And Biden himself wanted out of what had become a meandering, expensive, unpopular war. Letters From An American © 2021 Heather Cox Richardson

The devil is in the details so best that it be read in its entirety.

Meanwhile, I fear that the self righteous Republicans, who only recently were criticizing Biden for not withdrawing from Afghanistan sooner, will gleefully use this as a fulcrum to “steal” the Midterm elections.  On the surface it is a blunder of major proportions, not to mention the cost to innocent lives and more of our troops.  But as all things historical, retrospect with a political motive is a different lens than clearly seeing events as they unfold.  No doubt they (especially the Trumpublicans) will make hay while the sun is shining on their hypocritical countenance.  As usual, nothing tells it as succinctly and dramatically as a political cartoon, this one from the Palm Beach Post August 27.

 

“Freedom” for the Few at the Expense of All

 “(They) care little for our freedom, they care little for our aspirations and little for our happiness. No more! We can’t let it happen going forward,” Governor Ron DeSantis said recently at the American Legislative Exchange Council meeting in Utah.  This is how he characterized “Faucism.” He boasted about Florida’s efforts to reject mask mandates, vaccine passports, and allow schools to reopen without masks.  He did not boast about Florida’s highest COVID infection and positivity rates in the nation.

 

DeSantis is commonly referred to as #DeathSantis on Twitter as he climbs over the bodies of Floridian citizens and the overwhelmed state’s health care systems in his blind ambition to be the Republican candidate for President in 2024.  He, along with other populist, Trump Mini-Me Governors, have taken the position that some basic precautions, such as returning to wearing masks, violate the “freedom” of their citizens to make a choice, not to mention getting the vaccination itself.

This absurdity has even embraced the distorted logic that we, the responsible vaccinated, are to blame for “disrespecting” the unvaccinated.

Can it be more than three months that I wrote a guest column on this very topic for our local Palm Beach Post?  And it didn’t change the world?

 

I’m no longer merely disrespecting “leaders” such as DeathSantis, but I am furious at him and other acolytes of the Trumpian vision, a transactional world where plutocrats can tap into populist sentiment and use it for their own benefit and not for the greater good.

I make the point in my article but I will reiterate it.  One of the roles of government is to protect the public health.  It took years of battling over the “rights” of smokers to light up anywhere they wanted until, finally, there was an acceptance of long-standing scientific evidence that second hand smoke kills.  Imagine, public health laws went into effect to ban smoking in public places.  The “freedom lovers” finally learned to comply.  We don’t have the time to wait for them to comply with vaccinations and masking.  Stay at home if you think your freedom transcends the greater good!

It is true that the CDC’s messaging over the pandemic has not been on the mark at times, but all along they warned that unless herd immunity was reached, we ALL would be at risk for the development of a variant that could overwhelm the defenses of even the vaccinated.  Well, we are there.  And where is the CDC’s message on booster shots which seem to be inevitable?  The lack of transparency on the subject is distressing.  Where is the data on the inevitable effectiveness waning of vaccination? It is known that this decline is more substantial among the elderly.

We personally have been impacted by the “freedom” exercised by the lemmings (I wholeheartedly disrespect them) who listen to FOX-made-up truths and friends like DeathSantis.  We had planned a long delayed trip to visit friends and family (all vaccinated) in the northeast.  We made all our bookings in May as things had improved substantially by then.  We felt confident, finally liberated from quarantine prison. But as positivity rates rose to more than 20% here in Florida, and the culture wars over mask wearing and vaccinations raged, out of an abundance of caution we were forced to cancel those plans.

Perhaps younger people gathering in clubs, concerts, etc. don’t care whether they spend some time in the ER, but people our age have just so much time left and for us to be denied our “freedom” because of this culture and disinformation war is an injustice. 

But the truly upsetting statistic is the large number of the US adult population – about 30% who say they’ll never get vaccinated (compare to 8% in Canada, a civilized country).   Maybe deny them admittance to the ERs?  Tough it out!  Go to the Governor’s mansion?

This situation would be bad enough if we were talking about only the Delta variant and our poor response.  But long term the Republicans are positioning themselves as the dystopian party of the minority who can still exercise control.  Republican-dominated legislatures are passing laws to make it more difficult to vote and giving themselves the ability to override state election officials.  They are in fact making it legitimate to “steal the vote.” Until now, it was merely their self-propagated myth.