'Me-Firstism,' The Death of Patriotism- Selfish Americans Killing Other Americans: Libertarianism

[appalachiablue]

- ME, ME, ME.
________

- Daily Kos, Aug. 26, 2021. - Excerpts, Ed.

~ “And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you- ask what you can do for your country. John F. Kennedy (Inaugural speech 1961). “I have always found it quaint & rather touching that there is a movement [Libertarians] in the US that thinks Americans are not yet selfish enough.” Christopher Hitchens ~

Patriotism is not a declaration - it is an action. All the flags and lapel pins in the world do not make you a patriot. Nor does reciting the Pledge of Allegiance or standing, hand over heart, listening to the National Anthem. Soldiers are the most evident patriots. But Americans who help other Americans are also patriots. Bearing that in mind, let us consider what COVID has revealed about the so-called patriots, aka “great Americans” celebrated by right-wing media.

Dr. Nitesh Paryani, an oncologist in Tampa, FL was recently forced to turn away a cancer patient for the first time. As he told CNN’s Chris Cuomo on Wed. night, "We just didn't have a bed. There was simply no room in the hospital to treat the patient." And why didn’t he have a bed? The hospital was full of COVID patients. Paryani warns, "Delta is just ripping through the hospitals in ways that we couldn't have imagined & the strain it's causing on the health care system is unimaginable.".. A perfect storm of science-denial, misinformation, disinformation, distrust, conspiracy theories, conservative politicians, & their media enablers, combined with pure selfishness, has created a tsunami of sickness & death. A tsunami that did not have to be this bad.

If everyone had followed the COVID protocols of social distancing, mask-wearing, and getting vaccinated, COVID would still exist, but America would be more like New Zealand. And Florida would not be the COVID shithole it is today. NB. 'Florida, home to c.6.5% of the nation's population, has about 17% of US COVID-19 hospitalizations. What makes Florida- & Texas- such fertile ground for a preventable pandemic? Governors who have placed politics above health. DeSantis, Abbot, & a host of less populous red-state Governors have ensured the pandemic is a mass killer by appealing to the selfishness of their conservative constituents. They promote the ‘freedom’ not to get vaccinated & the ‘liberty’ to go mask-free. But those freedoms & liberties are killing Americans who are doing the right thing.

.. As COVID demands an increasing amount of medical resources, less remains for everything else. It is not just the lack of hospital beds. Nurses- the backbone of the medical infrastructure- are quitting. They are not easily replaceable. A registered nurse (RN), qualified to work in surgeries or emergency rooms, needs 4 years of nursing education & must pass the NCLEX-RN exam. Then it will still take years to gain the average experience of the nurses that have left. The medical system in Texas is so overwhelmed that Gov. Abbott appealed for out-of-state help as a county-owned hospital in Houston raised tents to accommodate its COVID-19 overflow. Where will this extra help come from?... Meanwhile, the states who have enabled- even encouraged- the mask-free, unvaccinated, selfish shits with their ‘fuck everyone else’ attitude are ensuring that Americans will suffer. Schools will close, kids will get ill, businesses will be understaffed, & new COVID variants, perhaps even vaccine-resistant ones, will arise...

More,
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2021/8/26/2048430/--Me-Firstism-and-the-Death-of-Patriotism-How-Selfish-Americans-are-Killing-Other-Americans

[LakeArenal]

1. The Ununited States... until funding need or natural disasters

[Deep State Witch]

2. I Was Just Talking about this today

My husband and I were just talking about this today. The worst thing that Reagan did was to bring in this whole libertarian idea that people have rights, but not responsibilities. That the individual was more important than the greater good. That the needs of the few or the one outweigh the needs of the many. It's literally killing us. If I was an Afghan refugee, I would prefer to go to Germany or Canada, where people still have the idea of community. Americans are just a bunch of selfish pricks.

[Skittles]

3. MAGAt Americans

a lot of us are still decent people

[appalachiablue]

5. All of that, the start of dysfunction & decline.

It was Thatcher, elected a year or two earlier in Britain- 'there is no such thing as society, there are only individuals and families.'

The creed of right libertarian, Ayn Rand selfishness and anti democracy mainly out of the Chicago School of Economics.

All of this had been planned in the late 1940s or earlier. Dismantle the New Deal, the Great Society and blunt movements of the 1960s and 1970s in order to 'protect the free market system under threat' as laid out in the Powell Memo of 1971.

[marie999]

4. Me-firstism - The reason we will never stop climate change

until the world's population is low enough for the planet to be able to heal itself.