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.