Tell The Fucking Truth.
On Saturday, as America reached two thousand deaths, Donald Trump retreated from his idea to force quarantine on New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. While one can certainly understand the urgent desire to drive more people from public gatherings, it’s good news that Trump abandoned the draconian plan. As the defacto President Andrew Cuomo explained:
If you start walling off areas all across the country it would just be totally bizarre, counterproductive, anti-American.
That sounds like a Trump trifecta, so we’re lucky he didn’t go for it.
I’m opposed to forced quarantines, but I get the motivation. We need more people to stay at home to flatten the curve and save lives.
How do we achieve that goal without resorting to this particular tactic?
Hear me out, because I have an alternate plan:
Tell the fucking truth.
That’s it. That’s the plan.
Let’s start with leading by example. How about the participants in the daily White House press conferences actually practice social distancing? Then they could add to that visual cue by … telling the fucking truth.
Americans don’t want to live in a death trap. They don’t want to experience the worst case scenario. They don’t want their loved ones to die. And they don’t want to die themselves. You know that situation where you’re gasping for air with a ferocious fever and there’s no ventilator to help you breathe, and unprotected nurses don’t even want to approach your hospital hallway-parked gurney?
Americans don’t want to be on that gurney.
Someone needs to explain that the alternative to this scenario is them sitting in their houses until the scientists say it’s time to come out.
Before we make people stay inside, how about if we tell people why they should stay inside?
Or put a slightly different way: How about if we tell people the fucking truth?
Our national message is on life support. It’s a hospital bed of lies. It’s the same prescription the president always writes, but this time it’s killing people.
People used to argue that we’re all playing checkers while Trump is playing chess. Trump isn’t playing either. He’s playing chicken with your life.
Back when Trump was telling us we had fifteen cases going down to five and then zero, he could have been telling us we faced a grave, impending threat and that we needed to begin modest social distancing.
But he chose not to tell the fucking truth. And he continued not telling the fucking truth even as scores of refrigerated trucks pulled into his beloved hometown to provide temporary space for an overflow of corpses.
Trump is a germaphobe who is unwilling to tell the truth about how afraid we should be of a germ. That’s how much he likes lying.
If he told the fucking truth, people would be voluntarily staying inside. If he told the fucking truth, brainwashed sycophantic governors wouldn’t have delayed their warnings, setting off a deadly sequence of events. If he told the fucking truth, we’d have the ventilators we needed. If he told the fucking truth, Jack Ma and Tim Cook wouldn’t be able to deliver more protective face masks than the goddamn United States of America. If he told the fucking truth, the rest of the free world would be looking to us for help, guidance, and resources; instead of looking at us with pity. If he told the fucking truth, his minions wouldn’t be taking to the socials to discredit the scientists and experts who are trying to save their lives. If he told the fucking truth, Fox News hosts wouldn’t be accessories to murder. If he told the fucking truth we’d have the fucking tests we needed to control this monster. If he told the fucking truth, our doctors and nurses wouldn’t be dying on the front lines wearing hefty trash bags and day-old N95s. If he told the fucking truth, we wouldn’t have 2,000 deaths right now, and our next two weeks wouldn’t be nearly as dire as they will be because our president is a fucking liar.
We’ll hear lot of plans floated as American cities are stressed well beyond their limits. Even if executed well, none of these federal efforts would make nearly as much difference as an administration that leveled with the American people.
It’s a sad and frustrating thing to have to accept. But someone should tell the fucking truth. So I just did.
