There will, of course, be a bit of a delay. After all, Trump was off the campaign trail for a bit, ahem, fighting off a viral thing.
We should not and will not make light of this except to note that this was and is entirely predictable. One of the most joyous things about fall in the deep south is that it isn’t 96 degrees in the afternoon, and the other glorious thing is that on Friday evenings at about 7:00, the entire town comes together, black-white, conservative Baptist, moderate Baptist, all types, to watch the high school football team, and the bands (which are outstanding). It is one of the most desperately missed things in this area – despite the fact that one can go if one is willing to take their life in their hands because rules aren’t quite as stringent with some.
We don’t go. Much as we’d LOVE to go. We don’t, because there are no guarantees in this world and anyone of us could get it and not get out of it, and we share a home with a woman who has the odds stacked against her about as much as the odds can be stacked.
Pretty simple, right?
Wrong. People that want to go to rallies are damned well going to rallies and they aren’t going to be told how to live their lives. Amazingly, no one is trying to tell these people “how to live their lives” – they can still go home and eat thick burgers and tacos every single night – people are only making rules about ensuring that we all have a decent shot at life until we can beat this disease back with a vaccine. It is NOT that different than not allowing people to dump lead into the local water supply. But Donald Trump, the nation’s “leader” is busy spreading the disease, and we mean spreading: According to Minnesota’s WCAX.com [1]:
As rural areas in Minnesota experience a surge of COVID-19 cases, state health officials say at least nine of those cases can be linked to a September rally held by President Donald Trump.
Officials in Minnesota are worried about a spike in COVID-19 cases they’re seeing in rural areas and communities that border other states. The state health department has been able to track some of those cases to Trump’s campaign rally in Bemidji.
Health director Kris Ehresmann said there are 12 counties with higher positivity rates than those nearest Minneapolis and St. Paul. The Twin Cities have seen nearly 30,000 cases in Hennepin County and more than 12,000 in Ramsey County. At least nine recent cases reported attending the Trump rally on Sept. 18, with one case known to have been infectious while at the event. There have been two hospitalizations.
Minnesota has some of the sweetest people in this country and it is tragic to see – no matter what their political affiliation, or what motivated them – to see that there are already two hospitalizations, a bad sign, and those are just the first nine. Contagious diseases work funny, those nine can easily have infected another nine, or ninety, without contract tracing (and we don’t have those fancy things), there’s no real way to know.
Entirely predictable and we will see this happen over and over, Trump is just counting upon the stories not really hitting the news until AFTER the election, at which point he won’t care. He doesn’t care now, he only cares that they don’t hit the news. And so here’s the news.
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Peace, y’all
Jason
[email protected] and on Twitter @JasonMiciak