The Ides of September

Beware the Ides of September. There are just fortry-nine days left before the Election. The West Coast is on fire. President Trump tells us, they should manage their forests better, forgetting that more than half the forests in California belong to the Federal Government. Yesterday he told us, “It''s going to get cooler. You just watch.” That is his solution to climate change—winter is coming. The Gulf of Mexico is awash in the face of Hurricane Sally. It's September and the weather bureau has almost run out of names for their storms, preparing to go to Greek letters of the alphabet, with five more storms brewing. The United States remains the disproportionate leader in Covid-19 cases and deaths. In four years of brutal combat during World War Two America lost just over 400,000 soldiers. In seven and a half months of 2020, we are nearly halfway to that total in coronavirus related deaths. President Trump willingly misled the American people about the seriousness of the virus from the get go, leaving our people and our healthcare system woefully unprepared. Meanwhile, half the country bemoans our lack of leadership. The other half loves our leader. Neither side seems able to budge. Both sides are digging in. Nothing changes. It only escalates. Ignoring politics altogether, all the disasters continue to inflict themselves upon us like the plagues before Armageddon. I am tired of people telling me that it's a cheap shot to draw comparisons between America today and Germany under Hitler. Too easy, they say. Unfair! Yet I have said for four years that America feels and smells like I imagine Germany felt in 1933. Now we learn that one part of the United States government is not afraid to act like Nazis. We already knew that ICE (Immigratiuon and Customs Enforcement) had no problem separating small children from their parents and putting them in cages. According to Fox News, a whistle blower registered a complaint that at least five female ICE detainees at the Irwin County Detention Center in Ocilla, Georgia, have been sterilized, receiving unnecessary hysterectomies. The Nazis used to sterilize people routinely. As one of my close friends in Holland said to me, “I don't recognize America anymore.” Donald Trump did not cause the virus or the fires or the coming floods. His approach to all of them is off-hand at best. It seems he would not mind seeing our country “decrease the surplus population.” he seems like a moron, but it's an act, the role he plays. America 2020 is not Germany 1933, but no one in Germany then had any idea what Adolph Hitler was capable of doing. All they had to do was listen then, and listen now even in the small corners of the country where human rights are forfeit.