“And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.”― John F. Kennedy (Inaugural speech 1/20/61)
“I have always found it quaint and rather touching that there is a movement [Libertarians] in the US that thinks Americans are not yet selfish enough.” ― Christopher Hitchens
Patriotism is not a declaration - it is an action. All the flags and lapel pins in the world do not make you a patriot. Nor does reciting the Pledge of Allegiance or standing, hand over heart, listening to the National Anthem. Soldiers are the most evident patriots. But Americans who help other Americans are also patriots. Bearing that in mind, let us consider what COVID has revealed about the so-called patriots, aka “great Americans” celebrated by right-wing media.
Dr. Nitesh Paryani, an oncologist in Tampa, FL, and the medical director of Tampa Oncology and Proton, was recently forced to turn away a cancer patient for the first time. As he told CNN’s Chris Cuomo on Wednesday night, "We just didn't have a bed. There was simply no room in the hospital to treat the patient." And why didn’t he have a bed? The hospital was full of COVID patients. Paryani warns, "Delta is just ripping through the hospitals in ways that we couldn't have imagined and the strain it's causing on the health care system is unimaginable."
Paryani notes that hospitals in the area are beginning to hold off on procedures due to lack of beds, demonstrating that the surge is not only impacting COVID-19 patients, but critical care for those in urgent need is slowing down and harder to find. He says,
"What we are seeing is just a tremendous amount of patients coming in. The other day, our emergency room had a 12-hour wait. Almost every hospital in the city is on diversion, meaning they don't have room to take transfer patients. Patients who need complex care simply can't access it. This kind of strain is something we've never seen before."
Usually, hospitals can plan on a predictable patient-load needing chronic care, emergency care, and elective procedures. But the vast spike in COVID cases has destroyed the math. Much as a natural disaster will overwhelm the emergency services, so has COVID overwhelmed the medical system. The difference is that we had it in our control to mitigate this COVID crisis, but didn’t.
A perfect storm of science-denial, misinformation, disinformation, distrust, conspiracy theories, conservative politicians, and their media enablers, combined with pure selfishness, has created a tsunami of sickness and death. A tsunami that did not have to be this bad.
If everyone had followed the COVID protocols of social distancing, mask-wearing, and getting vaccinated, COVID would still exist, but America would be more like New Zealand. And Florida would not be the COVID shithole it is today. NB. Florida, home to c.6.5% of the nation's population, has about 17% of US COVID-19 hospitalizations.
What makes Florida — and Texas — such fertile ground for a preventable pandemic? Governors who have placed politics above health. Ron DeSantis, Greg Abbot, and a host of less populous red-state Governors have ensured the pandemic is a mass killer by appealing to the selfishness of their conservative constituents.
They promote the ‘freedom’ not to get vaccinated and the ‘liberty’ to go mask-free. But those freedoms and liberties are killing Americans who are doing the right thing. The chances of surviving a fatal disease decrease the longer it remains undiagnosed and untreated. And as COVID demands an increasing amount of medical resources, less remains for everything else.
It is not just the lack of hospital beds. Nurses — the backbone of the medical infrastructure — are quitting. They are not easily replaceable. A registered nurse (RN), qualified to work in surgeries or emergency rooms, needs four years of nursing education and must pass the NCLEX-RN exam. Then it will still take years to gain the average experience of the nurses that have left.
The medical system in Texas is so overwhelmed that Gov. Abbott appealed for out-of-state help as a county-owned hospital in Houston raised tents to accommodate its COVID-19 overflow. And where will this extra help come from? States where local governments have demanded, cajoled, and begged their citizens to do the right thing. Places that have enacted mask mandates and vaccine requirements and that have high vaccination rates. Locales where enough patriots are doing what is needed so that they can afford to send help.
Meanwhile, the states who have enabled — even encouraged — the mask-free, unvaccinated, selfish shits with their ‘fuck everyone else’ attitude are ensuring that Americans will suffer. Schools will close, kids will get ill, businesses will be understaffed, and new COVID variants, perhaps even vaccine-resistant ones, will arise. And the nation’s nightmare will grind on.
”Ask what you can do for your country?” - you will not see that question raised in Florida, Texas, or any of the other me-first states. There is no patriotism there. Just flags.
