Make America Healthy Again

I made a better attempt at making a daily schedule and sticking to it. I put "Check e-mail, Facebook, etc." in my 9 am slot as a way of being honest about what I'm actually doing after meditation, breakfast, and TV news. I started my one-hour cardio workout well after 10 am, but that's fine. I had to stop a couple of times. Again, I have to wonder what that means. Maybe it's nothing, though sometimes I have a cough. I don't usually do sixty-minutes workouts this intense every day. Maybe I'm overdoing it.

I was able to do more work on that WordPress tutorial. There was a time when I could knock out a tutorial in a day and have that knowledge under my belt, but the depressing mood of the world, on top of my own depression, seems to be slowing me down again. I managed to avoid the long conferences that Governor Newsom and Mayor Garcetti delivered in the middle of the day, but I couldn't help watching World News at 3:30 and then the Mayor's conference later in the afternoon, followed by more world news. It's hard to look away.

In February, Trump told his supporters at a rally, "Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus ... And this is their new hoax!"

The first confirmed case of coronavirus was recorded in New York City on March First. There were a total of 76 cases in the United States. I was already seeing the numbers rise exponentially into the thousands in the coming weeks, but most news outlets were not yet sounding alarms because the numbers were small. Mayor Andrew Cuomo said that it's "deep breath time." He knew what was coming. Trump claimed that his administration had taken the most aggressive action in modern history to protect Americans from the coronavirus. Really? He said this at a Trump rally in front of thousands of people. Groups of people that large look insane these days. What a liar!

The South by Southwest conference was canceled. The NBA told teams to plan for empty arenas. LeBron James said he wouldn't play if the fans weren't there. The Grand Princess arrived in San Francisco on March Ninth with twenty-one people onboard infected with the virus. The next day, Trump said, "It will go away." He didn't want the passengers to disembark because it would be bad for his numbers. Nice job putting your election before people's health and safety, Trump.

On Friday, March Thirteenth, Trump declared a national emergency, but only after the stock market kept crashing. He previously tried to keep the stock market from crashing by saying, "It will go away. Just stay calm. It will go away," but that didn't work. Investors wanted to hear the truth, which was that thousands of American lives were in danger and he had done nothing to stop it. In fact, he had fired the pandemic response team in 2018 that would have taken steps to get us the medical equipment and supplies that we would need to survive. He took steps that put us in harm's way, but instead of acknowledging this, he said "I don't take responsibility at all." More than 16,000 Americans are now dead because of him.

Universal healthcare is like the tempting fruit of a true civilization that we Americans can imagine tasting now that Bernie Sanders has taught us how to see it in America's future. Many of us want it now that so many of us are getting sick and dying. One of my friends is recovering from the coronavirus and another friend is very sick. I am praying for her, but she may die. We should have universal healthcare. The Earth is also sick because of our negligence, so we need the Paris Agreement. No more socialism for the super rich and their giant corporations, which are like petty kingdoms in a land ruled by corporate feudalism. We should freeze mortgages, rents, and student loan payments six months, as my friend Kelly McAllister recently said on his blog. We need help but the ruling class refuses see that their money game is over. It only worked when we weren't falling victim to a plague. It's time to make America healthy again.