How far the fakely mighty United States has fallen — during the COVID pandemic
© 2020 Peter Free
31 March 2020
The following COVID-19 news report is richly asinine and culturally indicative
From the Washington Post:
Officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are considering altering the official guidance to encourage people to take measures to cover their faces amid the coronavirus pandemic, according to a federal official . . . .
The official said the new guidance would make clear that the general public should not use medical masks — including surgical and N95 masks — that are in desperately short supply and needed by health-care workers.
Instead, the recommendation under consideration calls for using do-it-yourself cloth coverings . . . .
Such DIY cloth masks would potentially lower the risk that the wearer, if infected, would transmit the virus to other people.
Current CDC guidance is that healthy people don’t need masks or face coverings.
© 2020 Joel Achenbach, Lena H. Sun and Laurie McGinley, CDC considering recommending general public wear face coverings in public, Washington Post (30 March 2020)
Let's put this mask news into historical perspective
The richest nation on the planet:
not only does not have anywhere close to enough medical protective equipment
to combat a viral pandemic threat
that it had decades forewarning about —
but
is now considering calling upon its 330 million designated helper-bee population
to make their own masks
from whatever scraps of random cloth
that they fortuitously might have lying around.
All this presumably, because this Great Nation was and remains busy:
spending trillions of dollars on trying to kill foreigners
(who do not actually need killing — for any sensible strategic purposes)
with
weapons costing billions and billions (out the wazoo)
and meanwhile
diligently surveilling every American
for any and every conceivable and unconstitutional reason —
as well as
sucking profit out of every human orifice
and small enterprise
that it can imagine
in its most splendidly Plutocratic Parasitism.
The moral? — When we survive the current COVID unpleasantness, our national dignity will not be (even a smidgeon) intact
A more ineptly and avariciously governed nation of people (who arguably deserved better) will be impossible to find.
Maybe, we can all die laughing, before COVID-19 gets us.
Which demise, I wonder in "passing"— is worse?