Doug's Darkworld

I only get to do this once, write my end of the world post. It was a post I hoped never to have to write, even though I’ve known all my life that this was a possibility, and almost an inevitability. And knock on wood, we’re seeing the beginnings of the 1918 Flu Pandemic and the Great Depression at the same time. I don’t want to have to write about apocalypse number three anytime soon, so no killer asteroids or nuclear wars now please. So the world is ending. By that I mean the world we knew, the world we all grew up in, is coming to an end. It’s going to get a lot worse here in the good old USA. It’s not The Stand or The Walking Dead, but the party is over, even if a lot of people don’t get it yet.

It’s the end of the world because the USA is uniquely among developed nations unprepared for Covid-19, and the people running the country aren’t responding to it in an effective manner. When one’s car breaks down, one calls a mechanic. When one’s house is on fire, one calls the fire department. When one faces a pandemic, one calls pandemic experts. Not Trump, he actually thinks he is smarter than the experts on the subject. Many people see this, but his supporters don’t, to them Trump is Benny Hinn. The problem of course being that the Covid-19 virus doesn’t give a shit about a waving coat or Trump’s hunches. Decades of science denial and faulty logic have left America utterly vulnerable to a plague that requires a rational and scientific response. Reality bats last, and in America, it’s about to bash our brains in.

Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, will die, there will be economic disruption unseen since the crash of 1929. And the economic damage to the planet is incalculable. It’s going to get worse because America and the world’s global economy is collapsing. And it’s going to get way worse in the USA because we still haven’t shut the country down. Millions of Americans are likely going to get Covid-19 now, our health care system will be overwhelmed, and huge numbers will die. Because the POTUS is ignoring expert advice and lives in a fantasy world where a few weeks of shutdown will fix this and we can all go back to work.

Americans need to take this seriously, even if the POTUS and his followers aren’t.  It’s time to plant victory gardens, the gentle reader will be glad they did. And the other thing people need to understand, it’s not going to get normal again for years, if ever. Even the few countries who have brought it under control are still massively shut down. And until a cure or a vaccine is developed, they can’t let their guard down. The world economy is going to tank, despite Trump’s valiant efforts to pretend otherwise. He seems to think it will all be over by Easter, and churches will be filled with happy worshippers. This is frighteningly delusional, mark my words.

Covid-19 is the perfect storm, as disease control experts have warned for years. Highly contagious, often before symptoms appear. More contagious than the flu. And more deadly. The perfect vehicle for spreading through the entire race. I’m getting angry now. Part of me wants to scream  “You stupid fucks, I’ve been trying to warn about shit like this my  whole life.” Covid-19 most assuredly was predictable, and we did essentially nothing as a nation to prepare for it. Moronic. So yeah, my last Covid-19 post in a while. I have a nice post on the earliest human fossil ancestor ever found in the works, we’re all worms, fun stuff.

To recap: There’s going to be a Covid-19 bloodbath in the USA over the next few months. The economy is going to take a nosedive on a scale unseen since the Great Depression. If I’m wrong, and I survive, I’ll buy the gentle reader a beer. I hope I’m wrong. Skol!

Stay safe and God Bless everyone.

Percy Shelley’s “Ozymandias”

I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:

And on the pedestal these words appear:

‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Copyright © 2020 Doug Stych. All rights reserved.

(Poem: Public domain under US copyright law. Image: Soviet ‘Boy Scouts’ pre-World War Two. Credit: Viktor Bulla/Wikimedia Commons.)