Hold onto Bits of Joy, but Not to the Past, nor what passed for Normal – Best of TREMR, OpEdNews.com Headline

Posted on May 19, 2020

We, and our News Media, need to get beyond the low hanging fruit of a politized dishonest Trump press conference and wake up to the reality of how bad America was before the Trump administration, how ugly it’s become since 16 June 2015 and how desperately we need to heed the humbling lessons of the Coronavirus:  COVID-19.

First, delete, Getting Back to Normal from our Bucket List.

Second, remember we’ve never been completely united.  Nonetheless our Exceptional Experiment was born, despite 20% of us, Loyalists to a real King.

Since 22 November 1963, however, we’ve increasingly ceded our power to the few who measure human value by income rather than character – even selling fake face masks to the unsuspecting.

To rediscover the good in America, we need let go of pre-COVID-19 and emulate our present professional and family caregivers, first stay-at-home responding governors, artists and the Arts beckoning us to a future that recharges our imaginative possibilities and reignites our creative powers to adapt and carry on.

We can resist reason with warlike boy toys, or rediscover, if not the balance of United We Stand, then at least the prudence of reopening an America wearing masks to protect others, gloves to protect ourselves and social distancing that spares all from, greater love has no one than to lay down their life for a stranger in need.

America has always been about informed choices: 

• Obamagate’s 2014 response to Ebola or Trump’s negate reaction to 2019-20 Coronavirus
• Embarrassed by waiting in long lines for food, or grateful for the kindness of strangers
• Stay at home to save the lives of essential workers, or at least, love thy neighbor as thyself with humanitarian social distancing.

Just because a third of us don’t know America’s greatness is due in large part to its immigrant culture, doesn’t excuse our tolerating the obvious bigoty of the world leader geographically closest to us.

America’s greatness overflows from those courageous enough to learn from our historic mistakes, like the, Trail of Tears, and other reaffirmations of the arrogance of Nativists, and ignorance of denying the catastrophic reality of the ultimate pandemic:  Climate Change.

Recalling our heritage of stabilizing regional economies through slavery’s forced free labor, we might recognize the fruits of its offspring:  There are now 573 Native-American tribes in America – and many of America’s owner class, care less for low wage earner health, because owners work in offices far above and away from working conditions, which embellished their bottom line expeditiously before COVID-19 or its American enabler, Donald Trump.

If we are ever to be what we claim we are, we must first realize our goal cannot be to recapture yesterday’s normal, but by absorbing COVID-19’s true lessons:  on 3 November 2020, we can choose continued disarray or graduate honorably from disunity to courageous cocreation on a new canvass of harmonious reason.

New York Republican Rep. Peter T. King and most House Democrats voted in favor of the Heroes Act, which Trump and veto ally Mitch McConnell promise, DOA.

Heroes Zoom:  dancing in the streets; serenading soloists, high school musicals, we’ve become Shakespeare perhaps sparing, eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow someone you touched may die.

Neither, rewarding Trump’s criminal associates with a get out of jail free card, blamed on Coronavirus, while the prison infection rate among black and brown Americans now eclipses the spread of COVID-19 among the general public – nor Peter Navarro’s projected sins on the CDC and HHS Secretary Alex Azar fairytales can be the, back to normal we seek.

Allowing White House cronies to convince us that sheltering in place is worse for our health than a psychologically damaged, and largely ineffective federal executive response to COVID-19, is the root-cause of our national mental anguish.

We must focus on rebuilding America, not returning to what we settled for before the reality show host was forced to admit the reality of a global pandemic in the home we’ve temporarily provided him.

If Conservative Republican leaders weren’t bankrolled by Dirty Money, Dr. Fauci and the CDC would be allowed to exercise our First Amendment privilege of Free Speech.  Being informed with all the facts is the best solution for America economically, ethically and emotionally.

May 11^th, I heard my Tattingers’ friend Jerry Stiller had died; and coincidentally, I interviewed a friend with COVID-19.

It’s unrealistic to expect most presidents to preserve our union, protect us from WWIII, or defend us against Great Depression and world war, because, government is choosing between the bad and  worse – President Kennedy.

We can choose to legalize GOP Gerrymandering or, Voting by Mail, eliminate forevermore this, normal.

The best thing we can learn from our past, is to graduate from it.