A Nation of Brats for the World to See

The U.S, while comprising 6% of the world’s population, has 25% of the world’s COVID-19 deaths. (Interestingly, we also comprise 25% of the world’s imprisoned people.) Coincidence, or could it be the Fates’ curious way of exposing a flaw in this nation’s character?

Perhaps it has nothing to do with the Fates, the Moiras, or the Furies. Perhaps it has more to do with a people who are not so "exceptional” as we claim to be, but who are prone to excesses – to being more emotional than the rest of the world, i.e., more spoiled, and more undisciplined. We like to talk about heroes here in America, but lately, we sound (more importantly, behave) like a nation of victims – people who complain that their lives have been upended; who pout that they have to wear masks every time they go out.

COVID-19 cases are trending down, and staying down in many countries around the world – China, Germany, Italy, Spain, Taiwan, South Korea, etc. That has nothing to do with the Fates. It has to do with people who have decided to suck it up – to put on a mask and keep it on. In Singapore, 95% of the people wear masks when they go out. They are not exceptional people; they are reasonable people. They are responsible. The irresponsible ones are in America – the ones who refuse to sacrifice their vanity for the common good. 

The Pouter-in-Chief boasts that if not for his leadership, millions of Americans would probably be dead from the Coronavirus. They would suggest that millions of nations with lesser leaders have already died. The opposite is true. COVID-19 has killed a half million people worldwide, and no single nation is close to having the 130,000 fatalities the U.S. has already sustained.

Nothing is so easy to understand as a simple graph. Put a graph of America’s experience with COVID-19 alongside that of other nations’, and one must wonder how the richest, most technologically advanced nation on Earth can be doing so much more badly than the rest of the world when it comes to COVID. Take China, for example:  It has four times the number of citizens as the U.S. – 1.3 billion people. Yet, they have sustained a quarter of the deaths from COVID that America has. 

Instead of being world leaders, the U.S. appears to be a nation of brats. And the world can see.  

As Young People Rise, Slavery's Champions Go Down

There are young folks going around this country tearing down Confederate statues. Some older folks do not like it, and they further complain when these young people, from time to time, knock down statues of the “good guys”, too. (They seem to suggest that these young people are meddling in grown-up affairs.)

First, this is the young folks’ affair. Second, let’s call the felling of some of the supposed “good guys” statues – the Washingtons and Roosevelts and Columbuses – “collateral damage.” (It is what happens to “good guys” when they stand too close to the fire.)

The conservative media would cloud the public’s perception of what these young people are doing. For instance, there is a statue of Lincoln standing over a bowed slave that they religiously hold up as a target of the statue-smashing protestors. Be not confused:  The legions of Confederate statues strung across our southern landscape is the motivating factor behind these undaunted youth. 

Such change as we see happening in America today cannot always be clean and concise. It is like the Civil War, itself. Do you think every citizen in the antebellum South was a white supremacist? They weren’t. Some of those southern whites were appalled at the idea of slavery. Still, when the North invaded the South during the war, those good southerners had to suffer alongside those champions of slavery who had brought this nation to such a sad state.

America’s young people should never have been put into a position where they are the ones who have to tear down those monuments to traitors. We should have torn them down long ago. Now, the "adults" complain that the young people are despoiling America’s heritage (when the symbol of that "heritage" is a veritable stain on America’s face.) 

The purpose of putting people on pedestals is so future generations will look up to them. Why should young Americans today have to look up to white men who fought with all of their hearts to keep black men, black women, and black children enslaved? Why should their communities, and their children, have to dignify the champions of slavery - men who repeatedly committed heinous acts against helpless black women and children, the likes of which men are known to commit against those whom they hold in bondage? What kind of “great” nation would even allow such a travesty to be perpetrated against its young people, and then threaten those same young people with prison when they declare, “Enough is enough!”

For every statue that comes down, a statue of one of these young people should go up. They are the true heroes. God bless 'em.