On the morning of 9/11, I was in a small crowd of commuters on the ferry landing in Weehawken, NJ, my three-week-old daughter in my arms. My mom and I were there trying to get to Manhattan for a pediatrician appointment although, clearly visible across the Hudson, I had already seen the tops of both twin towers on fire. When the ferry returned, the ferryman yelled "Go home, people! What work do you really have to do today? Go home!" Then we saw the first tower collapse into a mass of smoke.
It was all so surreal and incomprehensible on that sunny, gorgeous day and in the weeks that followed, the beginning of months of grief and sadness with pictures of missing loved ones plastered all over the inside of the ferry terminal and around Manhattan, pictures that no one could bear to take down.
Yet, for months now, the number of Americans dying from COVID-19 has equaled a new 9/11 every 48 to 72 hours. All the while, our president spends his days golfing, watching Fox News, and holding super-spreader events that he calls rallies. Recently, he packed thousands of unmasked supporters into a factory for a rally which Governor Sisolak described as “reckless and selfish…putting countless lives in danger here in Nevada.”
By now, we’ve all heard the tapes revealing Trump’s known since January how deadly and serious this new virus was and still is while he did next to nothing to stop its spread. Numerous articles have listed the timeline of Trump’s actions disabling our pandemic warning systems and doing the exact opposite of what experts have advised right up through the present.
Why aren't we all out on the street every day demanding he resign?
I think it's because, like 9/11, this new attack on America is so far out of our normal frame of reference, so heartless and cruel, and so outside our historical understanding, that the media and our political leaders refuse to grasp what's going on.
We need to shake off our shell-shock, numbness, and sadness to see these COVID deaths for what they are: a hostile, sustained bioterrorism attack as violent as the planes flown into the World Trade Center and Pentagon.
Harsh and/or crazy as it sounds, we now have a president installed by a foreign enemy who is committing mass murder, spreading fear, and devastating our economy for decades to come, just to help himself stay in power and avoid the many lawsuits awaiting him when he leaves office.
The party that is enabling these crimes has been bought off by the same foreign enemy as well as the Koch network’s home-grown, decades-long assault on our government from within.
These are crimes against humanity— our own government officials betraying their oaths of office to commit democide against us, both through deliberate acts and acts of criminal omission and neglect.
None of this could be happening without racism laying the groundwork— from Europeans’ mass murder of native Americans to Trump and Kushner’s criminal decision in April to let Democrats in ‘blue states,’ many of them black and brown, suffer the brunt of COVID-19 without a vigorous federal response to stop its spread.
Let’s mobilize now to demand these criminals resign at once, vote them out with overwhelming numbers, and demand that every one of them be appropriately punished.
Just as we restructured after 9/11, the U.S. must create a new system to prevent this type of attack on Americans from ever happening again. We must hold the perpetrators accountable, whether through joining the International Criminal Court to try them at the Hague or creating a Trump Crimes Commission with the power to recommend and prosecute criminal charges and compensate victims on the level of the Nuremberg Trials after WWII.
Finally, we must ensure that all perpetrators of democide or genocide anywhere in the world face swift, certain, and real consequences for their crimes.
I call on Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and all Americans who have a conscience and love our country to make these changes happen.
My three-week-old is now a 19-year-old college student, working and taking online courses from home. I hope that as we rebuild our shaken, grieving nation over the next few years, we can see more clearly, love more inclusively, and fight like hell to make the transformations needed to give my daughter and all our children a republic and a planet where they can live, thrive, and care for each other.