m**c
发帖数: 1012 | 1 On this day that marks the 85th birthday of the late Larry Kramer, the
prophetic, loud and influential AIDS activist and playwright who died last
month, his words about AIDS ring true about coronavirus. Kramer often called
AIDS a “genocide” against the gay community.
In his 1989 book, “Reports from the holocaust,” Kramer was careful to use
a small “h” for holocaust, so as not to equate AIDS entirely with the Nazi
extermination of Jews, while using a metaphor. But he was clear in his view
that the response to AIDS during the Reagan-Bush years was willfully,
criminally negligent, and that it was because it affected people who were
detested in society or whom the powers-that-be didn’t care about for
political reasons: queer people, poor people and minorities.
How can the same not be said about Donald Trump, the Republican Party and
coronavirus?
People of color have been disproportionately affected and that became clear
in New York at the outset of the pandemic, where Black and Latino people
were twice as likely to die, something that played out in cities and rural
areas across America. Add to that the elderly and the infirm affected
disproportionate by coronavirus — and thus seen as expendable by some in
order to save the economy — and you have a worldview that is quite sinister.
“You're the elite. You are. You're smarter, better looking. You have a
better future."
In Phoenix this week Trump spoke to a group of 3000 “Students for Trump,”
a mostly maskless sea of young, white faces and bright red MAGA hats in a
city that is seeing a frightening surge in coronavirus cases. He told the
college students, gathered in an evangelical church: “You're the elite. You
are. You're smarter, better looking. You have a better future."
It was horrifying to hear these young people cheer to those words, getting
high on the idea that they are supreme, a group above all other people.
It’s something Trump has actually said before to his followers. But his
intent becomes clearer amid the coronavirus pandemic. Trump spoke in Phoenix
as he has elsewhere about the young being healthy and surviving coronavirus
, part of his push to re-open schools. One of Trump’s staunchest backers,
Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick of Texas, said older people should indeed
die — give up their own lives to save the economy, and of course Trump’s
re-election.
Meanwhile, on Wednesday the United States saw the largest single day number
of new infections, over 38,000, since the coronavirus pandemic began.
The pandemic across the U.S. is surging out of control, worse than it was in
mid-April, when New York was the epicenter. Now we have three mini-
epicenters all bringing the caseload where it was back then, when we saw
over 30,000 cases per day (before it dropped to 20,000 per day after New
York flattened its curve).
Those three mini-epicenters — Florida, Texas and Arizona — are, however,
each likely to grow into epicenters as great or greater than New York,
according to U.S. health officials. But the president of the United States
— who was bowed to by the Republican governors of those states, who re-
opened the state’s economies far too quickly — has completely abdicated
responsibility, continuing public appearances in places where coronavirus is
spreading.
Trump has not met with his Coronavirus Task Force in weeks, and keeps saying
the virus is “fading away,” while he actually said at his dismal Tulsa
rally that he’d told his “people” to “slow the testing down.” He later
contradicted his own White House lackeys who claimed he was joking, by
telling reporters, “I don’t kid.” As foolhardy as it is, Trump believes
he’ll save his re-election by downplaying the pandemic — not realizing,
still, that he can’t outrun the virus.
Trump has made it clear that he doesn’t care about mass death, even as the
pandemic grows in a dangerous new way — and that’s because, politically,
he sees many as expendable. As Larry Kramer said about previous politicians
who looked the other way of a pandemic for politically expedient reasons,
that is nothing short of genocide. |
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