Sadly, our unfettered access to an endless barrage of media coverage has inured or empathetic response to long-term disaster.  I think it probably started with Viet Nam War reportage and the daily tally of the dead, the wounded and the missing in action.  In short order, those became just numbers except when one of those numbers was one of our own; likewise, those lost to HIV.  We have become so calloused and distant from the reality of our longest military conflict in Afghanistan that we barely check its numbers at all.  Now, a novel corona virus has insinuated itself into all of our lives and we are once again busy enumerating and comparing state-to-state, country-to-country, while whistling past the impersonal stacks of mounting corpses.  Our President, devoid of any ability to care or feel for anyone but himself, has provided no national direction to offer solace, sympathy or remembrance to the names, faces, hopes and dreams lost by nearly 70,000 Americans at this writing.

We are far from done with the threat from Covid-19.  What most of us are still doing, keeping proper social distance to protect ourselves and others from the indiscriminate devastation of transmission, one to another, is nothing less than miraculous during such a divisive time in human history.  Yet, the growing trend to renormalize, (far too soon by all expert opinion), egged on by moronic blather from the President and endorsed by his lock-step minions, endangers us all and spits on the graves of those we’ve lost.  This is not politics.  This is life and death, caring and not.  This is that Good v Evil moment when we must all choose to embrace our humanity or give in to our baser nature.  These Trumps and Pences and McConnells and Barrs represent only bad intentions and eschew any responsibility for the chaos they inspire while remaining utterly and unimaginably remorseless.