Wednesday, July 22, 2020

Falsehoods on Facebook


I don't spend a lot of time reading FB feeds. It's not because I am like the President and “know everything there is to know about everything,” but because if the feed is not from a reliable news source(and yes, there are many), or a personal composition, I find that often the post is toxic, wrong, and divisive.

One today came across my feed, and I cut and pasted it onto my word processor because it sounded too wrong to be true. I did a little fact checking. On this particular viral post there were 11 statements which ended by bashing the media and saying, “This is what you call a stacked deck.” Here is the truth about the 11 statements: 9 were either dead wrong(6) or pejorative(casting aspersions on a previous Administration {4}). One of the statements was true. So basically there was one morsel of food floating in a septic pool.

It is troubling that a President who was actually elected twice by a majority of the population and brought a nation's economy back from the brink, could be a target for such vitriol, malice, and falsehoods. Sadly, now that license has been turned on a lesser man and a worse president, his base calls “foul,” and whines about his unfair treatment in the media. Every unnecessary death because this President has mishandled the COVID-19 pandemic, will rest squarely on his shoulders, his enablers, and Republican governors and state legislatures who valued party loyalty over the well being of those they were elected to serve. I will remember that come November. You should to.

Having lived through two hurricanes when we lived in Livingston, I don't ever remember curfews, regular police patrols, or orders coming from the Governor's office or local leadership which engendered resistant and the outcry of “having rights denied.” Yet, in a tsunami pandemic which in Texas continues to spike with 365,011 diagnosed with the virus and 4,468 deaths, folks are arguing over masks. Really, are you so emotionally detached from empathy and concern for others, the most important right you can think about is walk around with your face uncovered? Frankly, I have seen a lot of these uncovered faces, and wearing a mask gives us all a break. What I want to say is, “Grow up, think of someone else beside yourself, do your part, and help us get past this mess.

Many of these infections and deaths are the results of cowardly leadership. What that means, lack of leadership continues to put our medical community at risk, first responders at risk, and if that were not enough, now there is a push to reopen the schools before we have any indication it would be safe. So you can add teachers to the expendable list.

Every single day our political leadership fails to lead courageously to address this pandemic, the hole we are digging for ourselves just gets deeper and deeper.

On the upside, there will be a place to bury all the bodies.

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