Twilight's Last Gleaming, Part Four.

William Adama: I've been going through Cain's log and from a tactical perspective it's hard to find fault in anything she did. Or that Kendra Shaw did.

Lee Adama: They butchered innocent civilians, Dad. Come on. How can you ignore that?

William Adama: I know that I didn't have to face any of the situations that she did. I had the President in my face, arguing for the survival of the civilian fleet. I had Colonel Tigh keeping me honest, balancing my morality and my tactics. And I had you. Now...you don't have any children, so you might not understand this, but you see yourself reflected in their eyes. And there are some things that I've thought of doing with this fleet, but I've stopped myself, because I knew I'd have to face you the following day. ~From Battlestar Galactica: Razor

I saw this the other day.

"Sacrifice the weak, reopen Tennessee."

Hold on, sacrifice the weak?

Who is weak? Who determines who is "weak?"

Let me tell you something. We are weak, all of America is weak right now, and without the proper testing, without the proper medical supplies, without an evidence- and science-based response to this thing, none of us are ever going to get strong. We're all threatened by the same thing. COVID-19 is a virus, it doesn't care who you are, what you look like, what your job is or where you live. Yeah, it's hit some places harder than others...but the United States is a big country. As the curve begins to flatten in Detroit, Los Angeles, New York City and Seattle, it's going to start spiking in Grand Forks, Memphis, Omaha and Spokane. It's going to filter out to Gulf Shores, Sand Point and Traverse City sooner or later.

Let me tell you something else, most small-city hospitals won't have more than a few doctors on duty at a time, a respiratory therapist or two, maybe a couple of ventilators, three spots in the morgue...and that's if the community is lucky enough to have a hospital.

But as usual, lots of conservatives, especially lots of rural white people, simply believe it won't happen to them.

Left unchecked, Belief will kill millions of people.

I was taught to believe in God. You know what else? I was taught to take care of myself and go to the fucking doctor. I was taught to adapt, to evaluate new information, and to make changes based on it if needed.
Because that's how you survive.

Because believing ideology or religion or willful ignorance in the face of a largely unknown threat, and one that is unknown due to a deliberate policy of Federal government incompetence at that, is only going to get you killed. You can dance around the fire and shout "Unga Bunga" all you want. It doesn't really do anything.

You can pray all the prayers, sing all the songs, wave all the flags and hold up all the dumb-ass signs you want, but it won't make the disease go away. Just like throwing a virgin into the volcano won't really stop it from erupting, because the volcano isn't powered by some deity dreamed up by primitive tribesmen, but rather by geology and plate tectonics and forces deep within the Earth that we can detect and understand, but not control or stop yet.

It's the same with this virus. We can test for it, trace it, determine its path and extrapolate where it has not struck and where it will if we have proper testing and contact tracing. We can actually control the spread of the virus if we practice appropriate social distancing.

None of this stuff is magic, it's not a conspiracy. We have doctors and public health professionals who can tell us and are telling us how this crap works. We have doctors and nurses on the front lines of this fight saving lives every day. This is a natural event, they happen.

Yet there are people, I know a few of them, who choose to believe that all this is magic and sinister forces that we can't do anything about...except maybe kill people or pray harder or something, and who think all the medicine and public health and science stuff is nothing but hokum, call it stupidity, call it vain egotism, I don't know, but these beliefs in aliens and magic lizards, mythical "Marks of The Beast" and all-powerful "ruling elites" and secret cabals of cannibals are going to kill people...let this crap go on long enough, and I guarantee you that these Q-Anon fools will be the ones who end up eating each other, because far too many of these fucking people don't see other human beings as people in the first place!

Doesn't it seem like it would just be, I don't know, easier to believe in civilization, democracy, and that your vote provides a check against any rulers?

And doesn't it work better to have competent elected officials and public servants who are worth the people's faith and respect?

Maybe I'm just an old guy who grew up before this baroque craziness became popular or before excessive reliance on cable news and TV turned people into spectators of their own lives and destinies but god damn, we have enough real problems, doesn't it seem like it would make things harder to make up other fake problems on top of all that?!

What does just sitting there on the internet believing all this crazy shit do but make dumb motherfuckers who are too cowardly and impotent to actually do anything feel important?

If these people really have such boundless faith in Donald Trump, if they think he's so powerful, then why are all these dumb shit conspiracy theories even necessary?

If these people really believe so much in America, then why are they so willing to throw so many of their fellow citizens under the bus, for convenience or money or the profits of the same "ruling elites" that in the next breath they'll tell you eat children?!

And how the fuck does that work, exactly?

These fucking people will tell you endlessly that they believe the Bible, except they don't. The minute something happens, they throw that right out the airlock along with everything else.

They believe in sacrificing their neighbors, their fellow citizens, their parents, for their own personal convenience and profit.

They believe they should have the right to put other human lives at risk because they want free refills for their iced tea, or a haircut, or simply to be waited on instead of getting the same food and having to go home and eat it out of a to-go box and have to wash their own silverware.

And look at every last one of these pictures I've posted, there are few or no people of color, few if any obvious non-conservatives or visible professionals that aren't people stuck working at the scene. What's the common variable?

Even more than income inequality, political extremism, systemic racism, or the ongoing collapse of our Federal government and national credibility the biggest threat to America, it's people and possibly the world we live in is the selfish mentality and a belief among a certain percentage of the public that the convenience and feelings of the lukewarm mediocre white loser are somehow more important than the common good or the public's collective health. "People are dying, but Karen can't get her nails done."

Whether or not some snotty white bitch can get a haircut or her nails done or whether some dumb ass white trash fool can get a hand job in a seedy massage parlor or some shitty old Republican Boomer can go golfing is literally more important to them than whether or not hundreds of other human beings live or die.

It ain't just racism, although that plays a part. It's that these people literally do not give a shit about other people. They value their distractions and diversions and feelings more than they value life itself.

If it wasn't for that kind of blinkered individual stupidity trickling up to become mass group-think and sheep-like consumerism, people like Brian Kemp and Donald Trump would have nothing to stand on, and they might not even be in office to start with.

But that they are, in the midst of a crisis, is to everyone's detriment. That people in the world allowed those who were not worthy of the public's trust to come to power has already caused hundreds of thousands of deaths and may cause millions more.

Tell me something, Georgians, was having a "Politically incorrect conservative" governor whose entire campaign was an exercise in showing just how much of an ignorant yahoo he was really worth it?

We may soon live in a world where the South-Eastern North American Biosphere Reserve is a thing, a vast stretch of land being reclaimed by nature, with a few cities and small communities that kept taking the crisis seriously, military bases, and whatever infrastructure somebody comes from somewhere else to keep up. It's not just the virus that will kill people, overwhelmed government agencies and public health facilities, large numbers of dead bodies and an escalating collapse of civilization will quickly magnify the death toll by orders of magnitude  Bodies stacked in hospitals will have its own detrimental effects on the economy. Restaurant workers who can't social distance and older white Republicans who refuse to will quickly form a symbiotic circle, a helix of death.

It won't just be cheaper and easier to let it all go...at the rate we're going, the Great Lakes Alliance, the Northeastern Collectives, the Pacific Republic and whatever's left of Texas and Utah will have their hands full just surviving and rebuilding from the toll the pandemic took on them. Again, this is a virus, a problem rooted in facts and science. That we have people who refuse to acknowledge this is going to kill millions and depopulate entire regions if it's not checked hard and fast.

Not to mention waves of refugees from the Deep South will probably overwhelm the mid-Atlantic states and those people will have to be resettled, probably in such a way that they can be used to fill a lot of jobs needed to ensure basic survival. Lots of other people are going to have to develop a real thick skin when Karen has to take directions from Lazaro and learn how to pick tomatoes. Privilege and racism will have to be among the casualties here, or nobody's going to survive.

Oil is trading at effectively a negative value right now, some crops are being plowed under because there's no demand, or no one to pick them, and manufacturing that might ameliorate that problem through mechanization is idled or repurposed on a global scale. Hmm, maybe decades of "Just in time" delivery and the main values of everything being capitalism and money weren't such a great idea. I understand the impulse people have to want to go back to business as usual, but we can't, not until this pandemic is under control or there's a cure and everybody can have it.

To try to restart the economy before that, or to keep up the shambolic efforts we have so far without improvement, or if we continue to value class and convenience, division and politics, racism and wealth over people's lives, our common humanity and basic survival...if we keep doing things that way we all sign our own death warrants.

The problem is that the people willing to sign their own death marks for capitalism or so that they can get a haircut aren't just signing their own. They're signing away the lives of dozens of other people by doing things that way.

It really is that simple.

Part Three.