• Despite how many have already died.
• Despite the fear and lack of grieving of all those deaths for the past eighteen months.
• Despite all the time we’ve missed with people we love.
• Despite every desperate plea from educated people who have spent their lives so that we could be prepared for a moment like this.
• Despite how relentlessly they demanded that we open America.

They are saying no, to the help that we have all been waiting two years for. They are saying no to compassion for other people. It’s as plain as that. To themselves they are #1 and everyone else is for all practical purposes irrelevant.

It doesn’t matter to them that the variants are coming at a starling speed and may soon morph enough to make the current vaccine useless. We would have to start all over again, when we have something that will currently eradicate this disease very quickly. It doesn’t matter that the ICUs are overflowing again, that children are increasingly getting sick and dying. Nothing moves the needle of their hearts enough to perform the simplest act on behalf of millions of their fellow human beings that they share this nation and world with.

Selfishness is America’s second deadly virus and it may be one we cannot overcome.

It will be here far longer than COVID or its variants, because it was here before them. Alec de Tocqueville said as much in his 1840s book about his visit to America. Even then, we were too consumed with ourselves.

Yeah, we have managed to survive more than 170 years in this state, but that doesn’t guarantee our future existence. Empires come and they go for the silliest of reasons. Maybe it is our time to join the failed ones of the past?

Maybe I expected too much from America.