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We do not fully appreciate how grievously costly the President's and the GOP's politically-motivated rejection of science has been, is being or will be. It will cost hundreds of thousands of American lives and damage us for decades to come.
Politicizing America's public health, driving tens of millions of Americans away from the simple steps that will protect them, their families & neighbors, promoting recklessness and death under the illusion of standing up for "freedom" is not only demagoguery, though it is that.
It is mass slaughter. It is not negligence. It is willful. GOP leaders know the cost, know it is their own supporters whose lives they are devastating, our own nation they are making suffer and weakening.
It is easy to dismiss White House or State Department Xmas parties as moronic symbolism. But it sends a message to the half of America that believes these leaders to ignore scientists and doctors, to set aside compassion and even self-preservation, not just now but in the future.
The blood on their hands is not just the mounting toll of this pandemic. It is the resistance to its vaccine they will foment. It is the resistance to do the right thing on the next pandemic and the one after that that they are encouraging.
They're rejecting hundreds of years of progress, the fruit of the Enlightenment, & locking half of America into the deadly grip of superstition & irrationality of the Dark Ages. Indeed, even in the Dark Ages, those who had the means had the wisdom to flee plague-stricken cities.
Trump and the leaders of the GOP are corrupt. They have betrayed America, selling it out to our enemies, to potentates overseas and to the wealthiest, most powerful Americans. They have conned their base into supporting policies that exploited and hurt them.
They have committed serial crimes. Many of those crimes, it is certain, we will not even discover until they are out of office. They are malevolent and repulsive to our basic values. They have weakened the institutions they were hired to protect.
But this wholesale slaughter of American lives is something worse. Hundreds of thousands of Americans are dying on the killing fields of our own politics, falling victim to a toxic cocktail of disinformation and indecency.
The lists of the dead, already mind-boggling and heart-breaking will grow. And someday it will be observed that this was one of the most cruel and self-destructive acts in the history of any nation.
There is still time to save those who have yet to succumb to their callousness. Listen to the doctors. Listen to scientists. Hunker down. Socially distance. Wear masks. Act like families and communities do by caring for one another even if your leaders will not.
There will be plenty of time for them to get the condemnation and ignominy they deserve. But for right now, break free of them and focus on the work of undoing their damage and of saving both those you love and those vulnerable who you do not know.
