Tim Barrus New York Times
Apil 12, 1861 was the year the bloodbath began to run. We are going straight hell again.
This will at first glance seem uncivil. It is the truth. Complacency is evil. Ideology is camouflage.
Public policy is constructed in the face of a pandemic the insular United States confronts with failure after failure.
Systems are in and of themselves, self-destructive train-wrecks. We can blame the virus, but there is substantial evidence to conclude we have pursued those failures with a harrowing intransigence.
Etiquette prevents anyone from articulating the sadness that this time around the flame of civil war, Republicans are convinced that the rest of us must be murdered so they might advance their sanguine social agenda.
Racial minorities and the powerless – or the poor – are shoved out the door not unlike unruly slaves while the masters cower in their luxurious homes.
It is one thing for history to repeat itself, but is it another thing for history to whip itself day in and day out so that reality is rendered rhetoric.
We need an underground railway, but there is nowhere to go, and more importantly, no one wants us. They are not complacent.
Racial minorities and the poor are what we call essential but it is death where we find self-assurance.
The virus will get you or a gun.
We are just another version of April 12, 1861. There is no westward expansion where we can leave the ruins. The enslaved and poor are dying. History tells us that their seeming complacency is ephemeral. Complacency means the blood will run. Indifference will not save a single soul.