Why America Cannot Unite To Battle The Pandemic

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A disease with as much as .5% fatality that is likely to infect half or more of the population should be seen as a serious threat that warrants unified action. But the problem is that policymakers are brooking no dissent, their draconian edicts aren’t working, and many of their policies are just plain illogical, such as closing most stores but leaving the mega stores like Walmart open.

Why can’t the leaders and the people agree as they seem to have after Pearl Harbor and after 9-11? They can’t because the desire on the part of partisans to take advantage of the crisis for their own gain overrides everything else. Policies aren’t being made based on proven methodologies that mitigate the problem while early trearment regimens are suppressed because they are don’t advance a political agenda or they don’t make certain corporate backers of the politicians any profit.

Do masks work? Which, if any, vaccine, offers real protection? What early treatments might mitigate the hospitalization or fatality rate? The fact we cannot even have a free and open discourse without the corpostate monopoly platforms censoring content and canceling people breeds wild conspiracy theories and claims in that part of the web not controlled by the corpostate.

History is replete with examples of government and/or corporations lying badly and causing tens of thousands of deaths. The “weapons of mass destruction” and Saddam-Al Qaeda link were bold lies that cost over 100,000 innocent Iraqi deaths. The entire War On Terror was and remains a bloodlust campaign far out of proportion to the original justification, 9-11. And let’s not forget the smallpox blankets given to Indians (as they were called then), the medical experiments on African Americans, and the notorious likelihood that whenever a politician’s lips are moving, they are lying.

All these institutions we are meant to trust and need to trust have proven over and over that they lie. Science is driven by a combination of corporate money and political agendas so much that those whose science doesn’t fit will be shunned and canceled, leaving only those who are willing to lie and cheat and cook the books to extol their latest “scientific consensus.”

If it seems today that most of the cooking of the books in science is leftist in orientation, the right has done the same thing with tobacco and even with drugs. Corporations buy results and consensus and politicians demand their scientific consensus meets their needs, regardless of the objective facts.

Is man-made global warming real? It’s not possible to say because the sources of information are institutions with a dedicedly authoritarian political bent who dance to the tune of their corporate and political funders. Are the vaccines legitimate and useful? Already, they are losing their impact and all the initial claims about how they were going to save the day keep being walked back and memory holed while the finish line keeps changing.

As this pandemic keeps banging on and people keep dying, the screws keep turning via lockdowns and mandates, the goals keep changing, and promises keep failing. We started with “14 days to flatten the curve” and now we face endless draconian measures that are not obviously working. We cannot unify around that. We cannot unify around lying politicians and their grubby corporate backers. We cannot unify around the broken promises and the end goal is always that we pay more and lose more freedom while the policymakers and their backers live the good life at our expense.

When a politician sounds “vexxed” at the other side, at dissent, even sending the DOJ Stasi to “investigate” angry parents to “protect” corrupt school boards, it is absurd and intolerable. We cannot and will not unify around that. But the tragedy here is that the need for unity to stop this virus and save lives cannot be met because the “leaders” cannot be trusted and we cannot rally around them.