Going Through Hell ... Twice
by John Lawrence, July 7, 2020
This is what happens when Governors, Mayors and Presidents don't follow the guidelines laid out for them by medical experts and scientific data. Governor Andrew Cuomo did the right thing, and his state is recovering nicely. Trump and his coterie of mainly southern macho men who think they know it all did not, and, as a result, they are ping ponging back and forth - open and shut, open and shut. These A-holes want the economy to sing nicely even if it means sacrificing a few senior citizens. Trouble is COBID has other plans for them. It is still out there, liable to spring up again unless people and political leaders do the right thing and model the right behavior.
Certain parts of the country will recover. New York state proved that. A Democratic governor did do the right thing while Trump and his henchmen were only posturing and talking tough. While they were doing that, Cuomo was demonstrating that New Yorkers were not only tough, but caring, intelligent and loving. That's how he ended his press conferences every day. Trump supporters can yell, "USA, USA" all they want. The fact is that Trump is not making this country great again: He's reducing it to a shit pile. The European Union will not even let Americans travel there. China, which has gotten the pandemic under control, is becoming he undisputed world's number one economy. China is being looked up to by many of our allies, whom Trump has gone out of his way to alienate, while the US is being looked down upon.
Trump can huff and puff all he wants about looters and anarchists and agitators. No one cares any more. Those terms ring hollow. People are waking up to the real American history as found in "A People's History of the United States," by Howard Zinn instead of the fairy tale history we all learned in school. The fact is that America was founded on slavery and theft of Native American lands. According to History.com:
In an era in which the international slave trade was starting to grow, Columbus and his men enslaved many native inhabitants of the West Indies and subjected them to extreme violence and brutality. On his famous first voyage in 1492, Columbus landed on an unknown Caribbean island after an arduous three-month journey.
On his first day in the New World, he ordered six of the natives to be seized, writing in his journal that he believed they would be good servants. Throughout his years in the New World, Columbus enacted policies of forced labor in which natives were put to work for the sake of profits. Later, Columbus sent thousands of peaceful Taino “Indians” from the island of Hispaniola to Spain to be sold. Many died en route.
No wonder his statues are being taken down. He is as much an affront to Native Americans as Jefferson Davis is to African Americans. The Spaniards were just after gold and other riches, and when they couldn't get any more work out of the Indians, they started importing African slaves. Some US states have replaced Columbus Day with Native American Day. At least thirteen states do not celebrate Columbus Day (Alaska, Hawaii, Iowa, Louisiana, Maine, Michigan, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oregon, South Dakota, Vermont, Washington, DC; Wisconsin); South Dakota officially celebrates Native American Day instead.
The point is that all white people are immigrants. My family came here from Europe some 11 generations ago at about the same time the first slave ships arrived. America is a nation of immigrants and the first white settlers did not treat the so-called Indians (a name made up by Christopher Columbus) all that well. Let's acknowledge the real American history and not celebrate murderers and enslavers.
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