EDITOR, The Tribune.

There are two issues I would like to address but I do so from a world weary cynical perspective:

1) As a race we profess to being highly educated, scientifically brilliant and it must be true we sent men to the moon 61 years ago? Yet as a race we cannot even agree on how to tackle COVID!

COVID has become a political football kicked around by the left and the right. Astonishingly we have at the highest level in the USA and right down through governor level opinions that masks, social distancing and the like are a waste of time. A blind man could see this as nonsense. Because of this myopia the USA has over six million cases, if Florida was a country with 660,000 cases it would come sixth in the world in regards to overall cases. There are Americans dying that did not need to! Personally that would annoy me dying for stupidity’s sake.

2) The murdering of unarmed black men by US policemen shocks and disgusts every country in the world, except the USA! The latest staggering incident of an unarmed black man, Jacob Blake, trying to get into his car in Kenosha and shot seven times in the back. The facts are simple if he were white he would still be alive. The young white guy, Kyle Rittenhouse, then a couple of nights later shoots dead two black protesters and then calmly walked through the police cordon with the AK47 over his head and was not even stopped by the police. Could you imagine if he were a black man with an AK47 over his head, yes he would be dead. Does their President try and intervene with positive soundbites, rub calming balm on the soul of America? No, he seems to fan the flames as he knows his base and it deflects attention from the huge elephant in the room his appalling handling of the COVID pandemic. The saddest part of all this is America can still not in the year 2020 seem to get past the fact that someone with a different skin colour is not necessarily the enemy!

You hope that the world will progress with time, you hope that with education we could understand our diversity and differences are exactly what makes us so brilliant and interesting. The world, however, is lurching towards populism, a right wing ideology which back in the day was called fascism. Loosely it sows distrust and drives wedges between countries and people – it’s all about hate. If you listen to Trump his speeches are all about hate and are negative in the extreme, the only positives you hear from him are about his own brilliance. As a cynic and with the growth of isolationist politics of the right making inroads into our collective psyche the conditions are ripening for World War 3.

Hopefully the world will see the advantages of the middle way and see the rightwing resurgence as the danger it is. Does history teach us anything? 85 years ago another right wing populist Adolf Hitler made his play for power. Trump uses the Wall and the drug dealers, criminals and rapists from South America to get his base into a frenzy. Hitler used the Jew, the “less than human” same hateful/hate fueled rhetoric. We all know. what happened next.

THE REALIST

Nassau,

September 10, 2020.