Blood on their hands
COVID-19 is not the flu. It is nothing like the flu. Apart from a much higher mortality rate, one thing that is, bafflingly, almost never discussed, are its devastating and life-altering neurotoxic and hepatotoxic after-effects. These include up to a 25% pulmonary deficit that could take two decades to heal, permanent joint inflammation, liver damage, neurological deficits and as yet unknown neurobehavioral consequences in the development of children. This is not something everyone is going to just “get over” after passing the mortality test.
This is what we get thanks to greed, the most evil and destructive and exclusively human trait on the planet. Greed — greed for money, greed for power, greed for status — is what drives the sickness known as the worldwide conservative movement and the Republican Party. Greed is what motivates your neighbors, without regard to your safety or the safety of others, to go into the streets and protest the lockdown. Greed is what causes Trump to encourage them. Greed is what causes governors in red states to reopen their states against medical advice. Greed is what is going to, paradoxically, cause the pandemic to be far worse than what it would have been otherwise. Greed is the human impulse we can blame for 55,000 dead Americans, and greed is what we must blame for the approximately half a million more Americans that could die by the end of next month. Gordon Gekko to the contrary, greed is not good.
And we have the Republican Party to thank for it. They had their chance in January to get rid of this child-raping, murdering psychopath infesting the Oval Office in January and they voted, almost unanimously, to keep him in. Because of their choice millions of Americans will probably die or be horribly disabled.
There is a thing in law called res ipsa loquitur, which means literally “speaks to the thing itself.” It is the legal doctrine that establishes that the occurrence of certain kinds of accidents are sufficient to assign the blame of negligence. These accidents are of the kind that are foreseeable by a reasonable person. Greed has caused the men and women of the United States Senate to become unreasonable and, as such, they didn’t (or wouldn’t) foresee the potential further disaster of the Trump presidency and, as a consequence, they today have the blood of their fellow Americans on their hands.
Not only must Trump go, so must they. Every last Republican one of them must go, if not in 2020 then by 2022. America doesn’t do business with terrorists, and if a group that willingly participates in the deaths and horrible mutilations of millions of Americans isn’t a terrorist organization then I don’t know what is.
The Nazi Party ended with the death of Adolf Hitler. In like manner the Republican Party must end with the defeat of Donald Trump in November. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.