To Breathe... Or Not To Breathe

Well, it's been a whole week since I retired and I'm still breathing. This is a good thing. Actually, it's a really good thing. I did not know I could de-stress as fast as I did in the middle of a pandemic coupled with an economic crisis. Who knew just leaving my job would cure a multitude of neuroses? Okay, I like to think they are cured, but maybe not. What they're not doing is keeping me up at night. I'm sleeping like the dead. It's great.

That said, I did manage to see one or two things that set my teeth on edge today. Considering I have pretty much turned off the news...or at least I'm keeping my viewing time down to a minimum, it's amazing I notice anything at all. However, every time Feckless opens his mouth, I just want to barf. There are days I seriously wonder why any news station broadcasts that stream of garbageness. 

As a theater director, I used to get paid to put people on a stage delivering lines in such a way that you believed they were the characters they were playing. This was the most important aspect of my job. YOU, the audience, had to believe them, the ACTORS. The operative word in that sentence is ACTOR. Actors, lest you forget, are people who do make-believe for a living. It's their job to make you believe. For the record, all those reality shows aren't all really all that real. Even the regular people become ACTORS playing a part whether they're surviving on an island, sewing a ball gown for the Met Gala, cooking Victoria Sponge, picking a date, or attempting to run a small business. There are scripts. There are edits. There is spin. It is not real as you and I know about real.

Bad actor

The jackass on THE APPRENTICE pretended he was a real successful billionaire boss guy, but pretty much everyone knew it was a fake; he was an expert at facade and charade, but not much a businessman because he was constantly stiffing his workers and declaring bankruptcy. He would sit at that table and make pronouncements that were fed to him before announcing, "You're Fired!" It was a game show; it wasn't real. And frankly, he was bad at delivering his lines.

Through the miracle (?) of television and some kind of hive mentality, people voted to have this schmuck run the country. Maybe they thought it would be amusing. Maybe they thought everyone would win some version of Publisher's Clearing House Sweepstakes. Maybe they thought he would tell everyone the secret of how to be a billionaire. And now we've got ourselves a feckless leader with no more of an idea about how to run a real-life nation than he has about how to run a pretend board room.

The short course is that he's a fraud, a phony, a snake-oil salesman, and worst of all, a liar.

By the way, I can teach you how to tell when he's shoveling manure: his lips are moving. Seriously, here's the tell: if his voice is flat and sounds like a bad actor reading lines, he's reading something he has been given and he neither understands nor believes it. His hands are on down, usually on the podium, as are his eyes, and his lips are slightly pursed even while reading. As soon as his eyes come up for more than a glance, the hands begin to move, he's clearly off script and he's spewing bullshit. There is no half-way. The man has no filtering mechanism for his mouth and whatever he thinks of flows forth regardless of veracity. There is a clear physical disconnect between fiction and factual statements with this guy and you have to be unconscious not to notice.

But I suspect I'm not telling you anything new. 

Now, however, We, the People, are faced with something horrific happening within our borders. You read the news. I'm not going to rehash the numbers or tell you anything new about how to prevent becoming a COVID-19 statistic. There are people much better qualified than I am to tell you about that. But what I want to warn you all about is the quiet, subversive danger our nation is facing because We, the People, didn't pay attention.

Corona virus was an issue that was ignored at the end of 2019. Hell's bells! I even knew about it because I sent clients to China for business and in very early January, word was coming back that there was a new flu in China. One of my travelers canceled a trip because, as he told me, 

they said not to come; there's some kinda bird flu going around and it's really contagious. I don't have to go now; I can wait a while. 

I remember what he said because he sounded really concerned, that this was something we should know about. I did some checking because I had other people going back and forth to China, and some Chinese clients coming to the States. What I read was not nearly as alarming as it should've been. I put it on my "things to watch for" list and promptly set it to one side with the other travel warnings on my desk. But I'm not the government or the CDC or even someone who plays a doctor on TV; I was just the travel counselor who booked the trip. I kept an eye out for more information. There wasn't much at that time.

If I knew it was out there, why didn't the people who were supposed to be watching for this stuff know it was out there or do anything about it? 

They did know. It wasn't a secret. And they might've been able to do something about it had it not been immediately politicized. But it was. The White House called it a hoax. They accused this one and that one of blowing it out of proportion when they should've been putting the mechanisms to stop it into place. The lack of action followed by the stream of lies delayed real action. And that hasn't stopped. Hundreds of people are dying, and the president says governors should treat him better if they want ventilators. Really?

It’s a two-way street, they have to treat us well also. They can’t say, Oh gee we should get this, we should get that. We’re doing a great job. Like in New York where we’re building as I said, four hospitals…we’re literally building hospitals and medical centers, and then I hear there’s a problem with ventilators, well we sent them ventilators and they could have had 15 or 16,000, all they had to do was order them two years ago but they decided not to do it, they can’t blame us for that.                                                                                                                          Feckless Leader on Fox News 3/24/20

All they had to do was order them 2 years ago. Sure.

No matter what the president or the White House thinks, this isn't going away like a miracle when the weather warms up. We will be in limited social contact for some time.  The number of people who have applied unemployment benefits is staggering. The number of Americans out of work is expected to reach the Great Depression levels by June.   
                            
Businesses will fail, many will never come back. While other nations are protecting their workers' salaries, our government is sending out checks for $1200.00. Can that possibly be enough to pay for health insurance or medical bills when laid off people get sick? We have no national health insurance. People will die because of that alone.

The reality we are facing is not pretty. It will get harder before it gets easier again, and when it gets easier, it's not going to be like it was. Instead of having a leader who stands with us and for us, we have a coward and a liar. And he will still be in office come November, because the odds of We, the People, actually having even having a presidential election in the fall grows slimmer by the day. 

LOGAN'S RUN: Last Day - Renewal

I have no idea when it will end, let alone how it will end, but I do know that the United States of America is standing at a philosophical precipice and We, the People, are peering over the edge. Some jackass Lt. Governor in Texas thinks We, the Grandparents, should do a Logan's Run Lastday renewal routine and just allow ourselves to die for the sake of the economic revival. Sure. Let me get my hemlock out of the freezer. The decisions we will make for ourselves and our families will ultimately determine who is left standing and I get that. That doesn't mean we lie down and die.

Meanwhile, I'm gonna do what I can to keep standing. You see, I've got lots of stories and adventures yet to share with Little Miss and Young Sir. I don't think I'm ready to lie down to die quite yet.

Besides... I 'm not gonna let that prick president sit in the White House without a fight.

The Wifely Person's Tip o'the Week

When you get home from shopping, 

(and you will need to go to the store at some point)

let the groceries sit for a bit.

Strip down and get the clothes you wore into the store

[ALL OF THEM]

into the washer.

Then wash your hands thoroughly with soap,

then your face and exposed ears.