We were in Branson, driving on the strip, by the , when a thought struck me like, well, you know, an iceberg crushing up against the hull of a ship.
There was this internet meme I had seen recently while scrolling through Twitter. Funny, I thought, as I moved on to the next screen. But here, at that moment, stuck in traffic and staring at the Titanic, I realized how profound it was. The meme showed a sinking Titanic, with various thought bubbles offered as to why the devastation and death that was happening wasn’t really that big of a deal.
Titanic vs Covid
— Magali 😼 Philip (@magaliphilip)
Je dédie ce meme à 😉
The arguments, of course, were adapted from those followers of President Donald Trump who continue to treat the coronavirus pandemic as a hoax. “Only old people and non-swimmers will die,†says one person. Atop the stern as half of the boat is under water, one calls the sinking ship a hoax. “It’s dry here,†he says. “Ships sink all the time,†says somebody in a lifeboat. “We’re overreacting.â€
People are also reading…
“Drink the diesel fuel,†says another. “You won’t die.â€
It’s funny, sad and depressing all at the same time.
My family had rented a tucked-away condo for a weekend because everybody needed to get out of the house after being cooped up there for several months. We took long hikes, played a little golf, ate takeout and wore our masks. In some ways, the routine didn’t differ much from the one at home during the pandemic, but we weren’t stuck in the same house, so we called it a vacation and enjoyed ourselves.
We came back to the news that a teacher in Potosi had died of COVID-19, at least two schools in ºüÀêÊÓƵ County that had opened to students had to shut back down. The same was happening in my wife’s hometown in Ozark County in rural Missouri. A colleague’s husband is hospitalized with COVID-19 as I write this. have died from the virus that is still out of control in a country where too many people still aren’t taking it seriously enough.
Like the horrified passengers of the unsinkable luxury cruiser surely did in 1912, I find myself asking the question over and over again: How did we get here? Of course, the hubris of the president in not taking the pandemic seriously enough, and constantly encouraging his followers to eschew masks and social distancing, in both words and action, have much to do with how we got here. According to excerpts from Bob Woodward’s new book, “Rage,†Trump admits on the record that he knew COVID-19 was more deadly than he let on, and that he intentionally misled the nation. Woodward has recordings of the conversations.
Nearly four years into a presidency built on lies, it’s still jarring when the president of the United States is caught in such deadly deceit. It is truly unlike anything this nation has ever seen.
But as I follow some of the local political reactions to decisions, and nondecisions, related to the coronavirus pandemic, I see something deeper than Trumpism at play. In the early days of the pandemic, many of our elected leaders in Missouri made similar decisions in terms of how to deal with emergency federal dollars coming to the state to battle the pandemic. For instance, the ºüÀêÊÓƵ County Council granted County Executive Sam Page, a Democrat, wide latitude on how to spend the federal money, with little direct oversight.
Meanwhile, the Missouri Legislature granted nearly identical powers to Gov. Mike Parson, a Republican.
What happened next was so predictable. Republicans in ºüÀêÊÓƵ County blasted Page, and the Democrats running against him in the primary election joined in. Democrats blasted Parson and the Legislature, and most Republicans were silent.
We have become so politically tribal that we can no longer see the forest through the trees, or, to stay metaphorically consistent, the iceberg through the fog. It makes the very process of governing, or even living in a community in which we depend upon each other, next to impossible because every decision starts from a place in which the first step is to demonize our opponent so as to diminish any opinion with which we might disagree. Instead of working together for the common good, we stand on our separate sides of the ship and watch it sink.
When the Titanic went down, of course, the world was horrified, and there were commissions and studies and new safety rules, such as making sure there were enough life rafts aboard ships. When the pandemic subsides, and Trump eventually leaves government service, hopefully after the election of Democrat Joe Biden, will we magically regain the capacity to love our fellow man, to rebuild our capacity as a nation to battle unseen enemies, or will we remain stuck in oar-less life rafts, aimlessly floating in a sea of political despair?
I want to be hopeful as the nation navigates the icebergs around us between now and Nov. 3.