Thoughts of a retired physician

Rather than post this on my Facebook page, I thought a few moments writing out a set of interactions today I had with a FB friend would be helpful to me. First, the concept of a friend on FB is an interesting one. The woman in question, in my age group, I have never met or spoken to in person. She and I happened to post photos to a now defunct website in the past and by liking each other's work, became friends. Nothing unusual about that. What has been interesting over the past five years is how political differences play out on social media. As far as I can tell from her profile, she is retired and has a degree in English from a Florida university and seems to have been a teacher, although I am unsure of that. In any event, it is clear she has right-wing politics and is a devout Trump supporter, based on her posts and responses she has given to me and others on FB. As any of you who know me will attest, my politics are liberal and progressive and I view Donald Trump as the worst d

It has been an interesting week, between the pandemic, the Republicans wanting austerity and protection for businesses during a pandemic, and Trump’s continued slide to oblivion in November. As has been noted by many people, complacency is dangerous, because Trump plans to steal the election . It seems clear that Trump and his henchman Louis DeJoy, the total incompetent he appointed to be Postmaster General based on his multimillion-dollar contributions to Trump and the GOP and his absolute Trump sycophancy. DeJoy has instituted multiple processes that will do nothing but slow the USPS to a crawl . In the face of an uncontrolled pandemic (because Trump and the GOP refuse to act at a federal level, tossing all responsibility back to the states -- shades of the Articles of Confederation ), it is hard for any reasonable person to imagine that this is because of anything except voter suppression through hitting vote-by-mail. Despite his stupid rhetoric (absentee ballots are ok but vote-by-

Winston Churchill is reputed to have said, “Americans will always do the right thing, after exhausting all the alternatives.” It may not have been a Churchillian adage but it is certainly apt. The crazy experiment of this country, now well over 200 years old, has seen us do many things right but a good deal wrong. Corrections do occur. Slavery was abolished after almost 250 years in English North America and a great Civil War, but then it took another 100+ years to correct the wrongs that occurred after Reconstruction. The struggles continue with the Black Lives Matter movement and the worldwide protests engendered by the extrajudicial murder of George Floyd -- and many others. My hope is that the generations to follow behind me do better than my generation, the Baby Boomers, has done. The thought that came to me today though was about dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic. Unlike many other polities, America has struggled with a lack of national leadership with a president who has no un

Donald Trump showed that his real concern is not reelection in 2020 but avoidance of prosecution for criminal activity when he commuted the sentence of Roger Stone on 10 July 2020. Stone was convicted of lying to protect Trump. The sentence commutation is a bald statement that Trump knows he has committed crimes and he is desperate to put a lid on it. As Mitt Romney noted yesterday, this is “ unprecedented, historic corruption: an American president commutes the sentence of a person convicted by a jury of lying to shield that very president .” America remains highly polarized politically and there will undoubtedly still be people who support Trump. Their willful ignorance and blindness towards his criminality has left us with a rudderless Executive Branch at precisely the same time as the COVID-19 pandemic is roaring back to life. The federal mismanagement of the pandemic is also because of Trump’s feckless “leadership”. He continues to live in a total bubble regarding COVID-19, where

Where does one begin with the sad tale of a Trump rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma? Yesterday, at the BOK Arena, Trump appeared at what was supposed to be an oversubscribed rally with a million tickets distributed and plans for both an indoor event and an outdoor event in front of throngs of his MAGA cult. In the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic the idea of an indoor event with thousands of unmasked people, yelling, screaming, and cheering was (and is) an epidemiologist’s nightmare. In the wake of the murder of George Floyd and the overwhelming response that Black Lives do Matter, the added complexities of such an event made its reality even more fraught. So, what did we see? First, the crowd size was gratifyingly much less than the Trump campaign predicted. In an arena that could hold over 19,000 people, only 6,600 people showed up. Photos and videos of the crowd showed the expected: almost all white people, many older, almost everyone costumed in MAGA paraphernalia (hats, shirts, flags, etc.

Trump Must Go - Racism Must Go For the past several days I have been watching closely the results of the horrific conjunction of events that have occurred in my lifetime. As 2020 began, there was at least hope that the United States and the world might emerge at its end a better nation. By that, I mean Trump and his corrupt cult, once known as the Republican Party, were voted out of power and a more reasonable attempt could be made to repair the Hadean mess this man has caused.  Then came COVID-19. With a totally incompetent response to the pandemic at the federal level, the case count today is 1,867,620 with 107,979 dead in the United States -- and rising. The best current hope we have is for either an effective treatment or prophylactic medication to be found (intravenous remdesivir has some activity but is no panacea ) or for a safe, effective vaccine with reasonable durability of immunity. We are all aware of where we are currently: states and cities in varying levels of lockdown