HOMICIDE
Had Trump not wasted precious time early on months went by with no national plan to intelligently combat the pandemic the lives of tens of thousands of Americans would have been saved. But the arch-sociopath/narcissist Trump is incapable of such human feeling.
So Trump, having no plans for or even much interest in doing the hard work of mitigating the pandemic, basically has dropped the entire issue. Bringing up the topic hurts his election campaign, so it's back to denial and barely concealed white-supremacist demagoguery. As Trump spokesmen advise, we should all "learn to live" with the mass deaths engendered by the corona virus presumably as the price one has to pay for the privilege of living in a healthy capitalist society.
But here, too, Trump runs headlong into inconvenient economic and public health facts. The economic outlook for the next six months or so is disastrous and will be even more so when the economic stimulus money runs out.
The situation will not markedly improve until the pandemic is more or less contained and under control. Since that's not about to happen at least while Trump remains in the White House the country is locked into a circular no-win loop.
GENOCIDE
It's not the usual swift wiping out of a vulnerable minority. Rather, it's a slow strangulation of a culture, with just enough violence, incarcerations, and occasional murders to keep everybody in line.
That definition fit the society I grew up in Florida in the 1950s in the era of Jim Crow repression where city cops and sheriffs deputies and racist jurors meted out punishments on African-American citizens so they didn't get "uppity" and forget their "place" in the well-ordered segregated South.
True, the modern South is a bit more tolerant and advanced when it comes to race relations these days, but in too many instances and not just in the South the overlaps are all too familiar. Especially when it comes to policing minority communities with an all-too-heavy hand (or knee) or bullets in the back.
There was bound to be a tipping point, a George Floyd, for instance, along with dozens more over just a few years. Enough was finally enough. And here we are at a likely inflection point in American history, with the beginnings of a full-throated reform movement or, who knows?, maybe a revolutionary remaking of the entire social system.
But there are the ruling forces of social genocide who are not going to give up their privileges and power without a struggle. Fasten your seat belts; we're in for a bumpy ride.
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