Protected from harm and danger, that’s what if means to feel safe. Lots of Americans would love to feel “safe and secure.” They want to live in a nation where breathing and working are unlikely to lead to injury or death.
They used to live in such a country.
Fifty-five years ago a young lawyer named Ralph Nader published “Unsafe at Any Speed.” American automobile makers had “designed in danger” to their products. Driving a Corvair was traveling in “a death trap.”
Detroit changed. Though the head of GM hired private snoops to destroy Nader’s credibility, (https://time.com/4124987/50-years-unsafe-at-any-speed/), eventually they changed their quality control. We got safer cars.
Will we get a safer America?
The auguries are not auspicious. The present administration seems interested in placing us in harm’s way in multiple arenas. Here are several examples of how American policy is now “Anti-Safe.”
COVID Safety
According to the president, his recent case of COVID-19 is a “blessing from God.” He added, “Don’t be afraid of Covid.”
Since when is this plague good for us?
Forget the hundreds of thousands of dead and businesses gone, the hundreds of thousands who can’t get out of bed or walk without breathlessness to the kitchen, heart disease, lung disease, kidney disease, brain disease, depression, PTSD. I’m not used to editorials in conservative medical journals that read as criminal indictments. The New England Journal of Medicine just published one. It describes the administration’s response to COVID.
But let’s consider recent events. An indoor-outdoor hugging and smiling September 26th party to fete a new Supreme Court nominee appears a superspreader event infecting a large cadre of America’s elite. Was the CDC unit dedicated to tracing at the White House activated? Were quarantines declared? Did behavior change?
No, no, and no.
COVID is extraordinarily infectious. Perhaps 10-20% of its victims infect 80% of future carriers. Unchecked, point outbreaks can lead to exponential growth of the disease. You act early or lots of folks end up dead. One to two million already have.
In most of the world, close contacts of people infected with COVID are told to immediately quarantine themselves. Isolate for up to two weeks because you can infect others. Forty percent of those with COVID are asymptomatic. Even those who eventually will die are most infectious in the forty-eight hours before symptoms appear.
Testing is imperfect, but quarantines work. Testing, tracing, tracking, isolating works. That’s how a nation as poor as Vietnam has two-thousandths as many deaths per capita as America.
When the president learns that his close aide, Hope Hicks, is infected does he quarantine? Warn and isolate the many other close contacts?
No. He gets on a plane, a closed space great for spreading the virus. Goes to a fundraiser at his struggling golf course in Bedminister, NJ, also hosting a golf tournament helpful to its survival. Meets nineteen folks who paid perhaps $250,000 for a “roundtable discussion,” next over a hundred others, many who will fly out immediately after. According to White House spokesman Kayleigh McAneny, this is done with “medical advice” and occurs entirely outdoors. Ms. McAneny, now ill with COVID, also told us on February 25th “the coronavirus will never come” to the U.S.
On his return to Washington, the president is tested and found to have the virus. Again, the CDC testing and tracking unit is not activated. New Jersey public health officials have much difficulty getting information on those who might have been infected and spread it across the nation.
These behaviors are consistent with hundred of other administrative actions one might call “Anti-Safe.”
Nuclear Weapons Safety
The president has expressed great admiration for Russia’s Premier, Vladimir Putin. Putin’s special intelligence units worked hard from the summer of 2015 to make Donald Trump president of the U.S.
So please consider a video Putin created in 2018 (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-43239331). He rather gleefully describes new nuclear superweapons that can rapidly annihilate the U.S. There are “invincible” cruise missiles, hypersonic missiles that escape all detection. One graphic displays the obliteration of Florida (https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2018/03/02/michael-hayden-trump-putin-missile-florida-newday.cnn.)
The president also promised Americans that North Korea would “give up” all its nuclear weapons. In a summit meeting in 2019, he said of North Korea’s dictator, Kim Jong Un, “we fell in love.”
The result of the love affair? North Korea now has between 30-60 nuclear weapons. With possible Russian aid, it now has a missile that can strike the U.S. It is also making significant progress in launching nuclear missiles from submarines.
Recently, a South Korean maritime official who attempted to defect to the North was shot at sea, his body burned. The purported reason was to protect North Korea from COVID-19.
North Korea apparently will go to great lengths to make itself safe.
Climate Safety
Over five million acres burn across the western U.S. Towns are obliterated. Ceaseless smoke overtakes San Francisco and Silicon Valley. As with COVID, people can’t breathe. They can’t do anything except hope the fire won’t come to them.
At this writing, over twenty- five named storms have tracked through the Atlantic. Hurricanes are increasingly common, intense, and deadly.
Is any of this related to climate change? According to the administration, no.
As the president said, “science doesn’t know.”
Science does. Human promoted climate change is now scientifically seen as indisputable.
But we do little as the land burns and the seas rise. How do you move New York?
Bottom Line
COVID, nuclear weapons, climate change are just a few examples of how the Administration has created the first “Anti-Safe” government in memory. Perhaps their greatest “achievement” has been the assault on knowledge itself.
The truth? As the president said of Mohammed bin Salman, ruler of Saudi Arabia, regarding his knowledge of his operatives’ murder and dismemberment of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, “maybe he did and maybe he didn’t.” Today MBS is known as “Mohammed Bone Saw.”
The truth is what I tell you. Nobody knows what’s really real.
Which is how millions now believe satanic pedophiles, often operating out of pizzerias, are killing and sucking the blood of young children.
And half of Peruvians, according to The Economist, believe that bleach is an effective treatment for COVID.
How do they know? The president of the U.S. told them.
What can you do to personally feel perhaps a little safer? The U.S. election is November 3rd.