400,000 — C. G. A. Peterson
It has been a rough year for America.
We’ve just crossed 400,000 deaths. That is incomprehensible to me. And yet, my news feed is still filled with stories of the dietary preferences of the man wearing horns in the capitol.
I’ve omitted his photo because.. well can we stop plastering this guy’s face everywhere? At first I found it mildly annoying, now I think it’s harmful. It’s sensationalism distracting from something actually deadly.
In Rome in the 70s kids would surround a tourist. The one in the front would have a flower he would try to hand you. The kids on the sides would wave newspapers and cardboard in the air. They’re surround you, then disappear. While your senses were overwhelmed, the kids in the back had reached into your pockets and taken your money.
This “Shaman” is the kid with the flower. A focal point of attention. The capital rioters are surrounding us. The politicians are behind, reaching into our pockets while we’re overwhelmed.
But robbery is a poor analogy for murder. It is more like the glowing light on the deep ocean fish. The glow attracts our eyes. Behind are teeth.
“The Shaman” is an intellectual distraction from what is really happened. He is a spectacle, a novelty. It’s the same with the smiling idiot walking out of the building with the podium. The same with the Arkansas man with his feet up on the desk.
I want to be respectful of the dead. But these goons are newspaper waving in the air when just a few hundred feet away the others were beating a police officer to death.
If horns and podiums are the images you take away from the Capitol Riots then you’ve walked away from a murder remembering not who was lying on the street but the weather and the background music. You’ve missed the whole thing. Glowing light. Teeth. Chomp.
All over the national discussion right now is “misinformation.” I hate this word. It is so passive. Everyone gets to be “misinformed” and no one has to be a liar, a manipulator, a con.
But before I go sounding like your English teacher, let’s pause on how weak a word it is and zoom out. One simile:
The Shaman’s horns are to the capitol riots, what the riots are to the virus. They are the flower the child in front hands you, hoping to misdirect you.
It isn’t just five people who have died from Trump’s lies and his supporters following them. It is soon to be 500,000.
If broken capitol windows are the image you take from the Trump Presidency, then you have missed the catastrophic mishandling of the coronavirus.
But there it is “mishandling” like “misinformation” — passive.
Like it wasn’t a choice from the start. Friends, we have on tape that he “downplayed” the virus. He admitted this. That isn’t “misinformation,” it’s more like manslaughter.
If your friend knew the ice was too thin, and told you it was safe to skate on that is more like attempted murder than misinformation.
If a car company knew the airbags had a shrapnel problem, but “downplayed” it, that is more deadly lying than being “misinformed.”
On January 6th, we saw on live TV the deadly nature of Trump’s intentional lies.
But on this grim day as we cross 400,000 deaths, I hope we see the lies started on day 1. Inauguration. And they have been deadly all along.
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Of course its fair to say that not all 400,000 are on Trump’s hands. People were always going to die from this disease.
That is true. But it is important to keep in context.
Those five people at the capitol didn’t have to die. Had Trump been faster to accept reality. They would still be alive. So how many of the 400,000 would still be with us if Trump hadn’t lied?
No really. How many. We can calculate it.
This graph shows coronavirus deaths per million by country. Yes, the bar for the US is massive. You may think that this bar is so large because the country is large, but this graph is “per million” Raw deaths by country looks worse.
But let’s throw out some outliers. New Zealanders did an outstanding job and are to be commended. But they also are outstanding in the water as two islands, isolated with a combined population half the size of New York City. We can’t compare apples and atoms. If we had handled COVID as elegantly as New Zealand, almost no one would have died. That is too high a bar.
Germany is a good comparison point. It is an industrialized nation that shares borders with other nations and has a larger population — bigger than the entire American midwest.
Germany’s deaths per million is 309 compared to our 955. At that rate, and I don’t how to say this. At that rate 270,000 Americans would still be alive.
Forget the guys with the horns. Forget the tweets. Forget the personality.
It was not just five people that died because of Trump’s lies. It is more like 100,000.
Can you even arrest someone for two hundred thousand counts of manslaughter?
Don’t get distracted by the war paint. By the horns. If Trump has a skill it is controlling the narrative. Don’t let him. And don’t take the bait that is was somehow inevitable. To believe that would be to be “misinformed.”
These were choices made. A series of choices to make deadly lies in the name of saving face.
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You could object to these numbers and say we’re not Germany. That’s fine. If you run them for Canada or the Netherlands you get 243,000 and 142,000. So to put it in no uncertain terms, if we had had a competent, unified, reality based response to the virus, more than 100,000 people would still be alive.
And this is to say nothing about how we are not done yet. It took 36 days to go from 300,000 deaths to 400,000. Almost one unnecessary 9/11 per day. Even with the most competent rollout of the vaccine we will be at well past 500,000 before this is over.
Adjusting those numbers that means if we had responded on the order of the Netherlands, Canada, or Germany, 178,000, 303,000 or 338,000 people could have been saved.
That is 6 Vietnam Wars. 50 combined wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. 101 September 11ths — that didn’t need to be. If Bush could have prevented 9/11 and “downplayed” it, we’d have had his resignation.
No. “Misinformation” is too weak a word for willful ignorance and intentional deception.
All that is left is one thing. Poor Trump sheep right? How sad that so many were deceived. They, the manipulated deserve our pity right? Some probably do, but let’s not patronize them by calling them sheep.
Americans, particularly in-your-face-flag waving Americans pride themselves on many things. Being sheep is not one of them. The Republican Party is the party of personal responsibility — allegedly. So a little bit of tough love for the anti-maskers. If you chose not to wear a mask because you didn’t think it was a big deal, you are part of it. You broke down the windows of the capitol too. Not too late to change your behavior, but you were part of it.
If you want America to be respected, if you want to be respected, don’t play the card of blameless gullibility. Don’t shrug off reality. Don’t shrug off responsibility. You’re smart enough. You could have figured it out before so many of my friends had to watch their parents and grandparents die.
Deliberate deception requires either sheep to follow or willful ignorance. Figure out which one you were and take ownership. Maybe then we can prevent the 8th or 9th Vietnam War’s length list of needless deaths.
Americans were never meant to be sheep. Democracy is meant to be leadership by the people.
The way forward is unity, but we don’t get unity when we are living in separate realities. We don’t get unity when the ice is breaking under our feet and we tell ourselves cold water is a liberal conspiracy.
The fish has teeth. In front of it floats a very retweetable glowing light. I beg of you, if you haven’t yet, admit the monster has been floating there the whole time, in plain sight.
It’s easier now because the fish is swimming away. The afterimage of a bright light can persist in our eyes for a time. But we owe no allegiance to the fish. Especially one whose misinformation — whose lies have killed more of us than any enemy, no than all our enemies combined in the last half century.
We have a lot of healing to do, but the tumor needs to be removed, with precision, before the chemo takes effect. The bone has to be set before the cast is bound. Our body requires it.
Originally published at https://cgapeterson.com on January 20, 2021.