Imagine being a firefighter trying to put out a fire and there are a bunch of people standing around continuing to pour gasoline on that fire. To most of us, that would seem almost impossible to imagine but the current situation with the COVID pandemic is essentially the same scenario. There is a continuous stream of stories about health care workers who are getting burned out from both physical and emotional fatigue. They are on the front lines of this pandemic and they must feel exactly like the firefighter trying to put out a fire with people standing around pouring gas on the fire they are trying to put out.
The ability to get this pandemic under control is within our grasp by undertaking a few simple actions – get vaccinated, wear masks in indoor and crowded settings, wash your hands, practice social distancing. It’s not rocket science and yet a large segment of the population is refusing to do their part to get this thing under control. At Trump’s rally in Alabama over the weekend, he talked about getting the vaccine and he got booed by some in the crowd. The vaccination rate in Alabama is the lowest in the country, the COVID cases are skyrocketing, hospitals are full and in crisis – and people booed the idea of getting a vaccination!
Many of these people who are refusing to wear masks and get vaccinated yell loudly about their freedom to make those decisions. The irony is that tens of thousands of men and women made huge sacrifices, sometimes with their lives, to provide those freedoms. And these anti-mask and anti-vaccine people aren’t willing to make even a small sacrifice to honor the people who have sacrificed so much for them. That certainly doesn’t strike me as ‘patriotic’. Instead, it exudes an attitude of ‘screw you,’ this is all about me and I really don’t give a damn about my neighbors, my community or my country. That is about as unpatriotic as you can get. As they say, actions speak louder than words.
And speaking of ‘patriotic’, the ongoing effort to repatriate Americans from Afghanistan along with those who helped the Americans during the 20 years war continues. It is certainly chaotic but as was pointed out in Heather Cox Richardson’s latest blog post:
“Interestingly, much of the U.S. media is describing this scenario as a disaster for President Biden. Yet, on CNN this morning, Matthew Dowd, who was the chief strategist for the Bush-Cheney ticket in 2004, noted that more than 20,000 people have been evacuated from Afghanistan without a single loss of an American life, while in the same period of time, 5000 Americans have died from Covid-19 and 500 have died from gunshots.”1
A lot of the media coverage of what is going in Kabul centers around the rapidity with which the takeover of the Taliban occurred and the ensuing chaos to evacuate Americans. However, anyone who thinks that this could ever be done in a 100 percent orderly fashion is deluding themselves for a couple of reasons. First of all, there are no doubt a lot of Americans who were living in Afghanistan and felt that they had time to get out or perhaps thought that they might just stay.
Many years ago, when I was living in Kuwait, I set up and ran a data processing facility to support the project we were doing there. At one point I had need for a data entry person and I hired an American lady who was the wife of a contractor there to support the Hawk missile batteries installed in the country at the time. Prior to Kuwait, they had been living in Iran (the husband supporting US installed missile batteries there) for several years during the period when the Shah was in power. They were very happy in Iran. They had a beautiful villa filled with nice furniture and expensive rugs. They had local Iranian friends. Life was good.
When the political situation started to deteriorate because of the uprising against the Shah, they were warned by the US Embassy that they should think about leaving the country. They chose to stay. They were thinking they would be fine because they had many local friends and were well acclimated to the culture. As you may recall, the Shah fell very quickly and the situation deteriorated overnight. This lady and her family received a call from the US Embassy telling them they had two hours to get to the airport and they could each carry two suitcases. That was it. They left their entire life behind in the evacuation.
While there is no doubt there will be much after-action analysis of this whole troop withdrawal and evacuation of personnel in Afghanistan, I would argue, there was no way to do this without some level of chaos. Part of that is that we have a long history of underestimating how fast the political situation can change. And that holds true here in America as well as anywhere else.