This is Thursday. Since Sunday, we’ve had more than 1,000 new cases of the novel coronavirus COVID-19 in Alabama. Let that number sink in. Some of those 1,000-plus new cases will end in death or permanent damage. Our caseloads are going up. They’re not on a plateau. They are increasing, by more than 1,000 in four days.
Open up!
As I travel to the undisclosed location on UAB’s campus where I work on my upcoming classes, write recommendation letters, and prepare for school in the fall, I’m seeing more and more people on the streets. I don’t think I have ever seen as many people out walking their dogs or just walking, period. When I visit my corner convenience store to buy a bottle of wine or an emergency bag of dog food, I don my mask and disposable gloves. Yet, even though the store’s owners are responsible, requiring social distancing and masks, about half the people I see in the store don’t wear masks. I get in and out quickly, throw my gloves in the garbage can outside and sanitize my hands and car surfaces.
As I was driving around working on this story, fewer than half the people I see on the street or entering big-box stores like Wal-Mart or grocery stores, are bothering to wear masks.
Is it simply cabin fever leading desperate people out onto the streets without protective gear during a world pandemic? Have we just decided that more deaths are worth it to restart the economy? We’re getting close to 100,000 people killed since February across the country.
The feeble response to the pandemic in Washington, D.C., has caused many unnecessary deaths. This is the legacy of the Trump administration: A wrecked economy, and, before it’s over, hundreds of thousands of wrecked families.
I remember Ronald Reagan speaking to the nation after the Challenger explosion, Bill Clinton’s response after the Oklahoma City federal building was bombed, George W. Bush’s empathy after 9/11, Barack Obama’s grief after mass shootings at Sandy Hook in Connecticut and at a church in Charleston, S.C.
Donald Trump lacks any empathy whatsoever. Mostly, he tries to redirect blame to anybody but his administration. Truman’s “the buck stops here” has no place in the Trump White House. Maybe “nothing stops here” would be more suited. Trump is so petty that even during a deadly pandemic, he refuses to schedule the long tradition of unveiling his predecessor’s White House portrait. (Nothing gets under Trump’s orange skin more than a black-skinned man who is far more popular with people in this country than Trump will ever be.)
Parts of all 50 states are reopening; at one point, it seemed Gov. Kay Ivey was taking it slow, but apparently no longer. People are gathering right here in Birmingham and in Alabama, violating social distancing and mask requirements because apparently they don’t care.
In too many ways, it appears Trump’s pathological narcissism is a novel coronavirus, too, infecting many Americans with anger, hate, and reckless abandon. They swallowed the bleach, so to speak.
That, too, will be this awful man’s legacy.
Make America great again? What a joke. It’ll take a Democrat to do that. Again.
Joey Kennedy, a Pulitzer Prize winner, writes a column each week for Alabama Political Reporter. Email: joeykennedy@me.com.
