If Trump was a gunshot to the leg to America's international reputation, I'm sorry, but this COVID is getting hit in the back of the head with a brick.
Every country in the whole wide world was handed the same virus. We all have the SAME virus. The USA has simply... not... behaved as adults.
And if I see ONE MORE TIME that it is some sort of CULTURAL IDEA that freedom means you cannot listen "Oh but we're not like the Koreans, we believe in liberty and that's why--" I am going to SCREAM!
No. It isn't about personal freedom. I live in Canada's yeehaw country where people are as obsessed with personal freedom as any American. Freedom means tooling around in your 4 wheeler using racial slurs and shooting deer-- not great, maybe. But even the redneckiest, dip-chewing-est, spittin' Albertan stayed the fuck indoors. Even our protest (embarrassing) was a loose gathering of 50 people and one guy with a megaphone asking the restrictions be eased on CAMPING. (Which they were, afterwards.) Our worst outbreak happened when an American meat company didn't treat its labourers with respect or appropriate safety-- go figure.
This failing is about the deeply engrained culture of scientific mistrust, mistrust of authority, contempt for the common man, and complete hysteria at even the slightest inconvenience. The idea of America being the light of the world, the leader, the statue of liberty-- 72,000 Americans have DIED in service of NOTHING. More than Vietnam! More than Iraq, more than 30 9/11s. Isn't the first word LIFE, liberty, and pursuit of happiness?
It's not all FOX News and it's not all Donald Trump-- though of course they're part of it-- it's just as much the Instagram influencers in the Hamptons and the Georgia eyebrows waxes. I think of all my friends who are from or who moved to the USA and they just like, paint pottery and make cooking videos. All I have done for the last several months, and honestly all EVERY Canadian I know who is still employed for the last few months, is work on COVID stuff. Policies to help the supply chain. Redesigning the homeless shelters. Getting emergency food out to isolated communities. What are we going to do for the elders? What are we going to do for the children?
Meanwhile, a friend in NYC makes pasta sauce and makes no mention. You'd never know. I do not see the outpouring of grief in America that I see here. Half of our deaths are in Quebec, nearly all in Montreal, and so many in care homes. Do we say "oh, but they're francophones, old and frail, that's not me"? NO! But I see so many Reddit users post-hoc justifying the death rate as "lol shrug NYC it is what it is baby."
I used to think America was desensitized to school shootings-- that it was so saturated it couldn't see the horror everyone else sees SO CLEARLY. But that's not the case. The USA has simply lost any sense of humanity beyond the gates of your little cul-de-sac. There is always a justification-- oh, those are republicans, those are new yorkers, those are black people, those aren't me. THEY ARE YOU!!! YOU ARE THEY!!!
It just makes me feel sick. I feel sick the same way I felt sick about Sandy Hook. I used to think we were so alike.