Nature would have found a way to succeed at infecting us with stealth and speed, even if we were prepared with those PPEs. Americans have only just begun to protest necessarily strict public policies and/or recommendations in this horror show; what's worse, some consider the whole thing a hoax.
Even prepared, humans are social beings and require contact and expression of our feelings with each other. To suppress or humiliate the unfit or gentle ones, only leads to issues of more widespread mental health issues.
Politically, we are polarized because over decades, GOP policies have stripped away economic social safety nets and programs that ruin health in our world - environmental, food production, herbicides/pesticides, decaying infrastructure, housing, commerce, fiat monies just for the printing or digitizing and an economy feeding the elite with American debt and guided exploitation of competition, dumbing down education. Need I go on with the lack of oversight on theft and greed/corruption with "the marketplace" of profits over people's well-being.
The tipping point has now been reached. It will be hard to reshape a feeling of unselfish contentment in using our collective talents for the good of others rather than for a 7th bigger yet unnecessary residence, a larger boat, a private jet of convenience, the convenience of a fine meal. Just look at CEOs preference for cheaper foreign labor and high-cost American advanced education that recognized only tokens of our youth skilled at low levels of book-learning instead of high levels of conscience or embedded among those that suffer from transgenerational trauma and/or current abuse and neglect by people with a very narrow worldview. Oh yes, a change is goin' come; it must. It saps our economic immunity, our flexibility in facing challenges. Let's not screw this up now with a return to too early "normal."
Now, unprepared, because of a pandemic that invades humanity's cells all over the globe with uncertain immunity, that federal drowned-in-the-bathtub ideology that well served malignant racist, misogynist xenophobic, selfish, gaslighting narcissists who want it all threaten our original ideals of democracy, community, and economy as well as point out the failings of a broken system of paying for medical expertise that even kills those with that expertise, the crisis of a pathogen that doesn't really play favorites and lays waste to our energy and dreams of better, less aggressive yet still passionate, more peaceful full lives of contentment.
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