I’ve read a comment on TRemeritus on a piece of mine that
they picked up. This particular commentator claimed that he could identify me
by the number of digs, both subtle and overt at America and that I had a biased
and myopic view based on my East Asian Heritage.
Well, he is partly right. I am ethnically Chinese, which
means I have East Asian heritage. However, as my late grandmother lamented, my
command of Cantonese and Mandarin is so poor that it would be hard for me to claim
full rights to having “East Asian Heritage.”
I am not “Anti-American.” I have been blessed by America on
a very personal level. My step-dad, Lee taught me that family was not
necessarily about blood and when my Dad married my first stepmother, I got a bonus
of what is best about America in the form of my step-grandma, Joan.
These families I got represented what makes America Great. They were not just ethnically diverse but also
welcomed members of different sexualities, religious views and even political
points of view. Yet, despite the many differences, we came together as family.
We loved and we laughed together and our bonds have remained as strong as they’ve
been. My stepsister, Carol, in particular has done a wonderful job of keeping
this group of differing personalities together. For the record, both American
families that my parents married into are White and Lee’s side of the family
cannot claim to be vastly wealthy.
Unfortunately, it has become imperative to stress these last
two points to make the point that I have experienced ordinary white Americans (as
opposed to the “wealthy liberal” elite far removed from the issues this administration
claims to solve), who are distressed by the current administration’s antics. My
distaste for Trump as I’ve often said on every public forum available to me has
nothing to do with left or right political leanings but human decency and dare,
I say competence. The White America that I know and call family are
intrinsically decent and rhetoric of us versus them only offends them.
So, where I do take digs at America, is not so much America
as a country but at the ideas generated by this administration. In my defense,
I am probably only doing what countless American comedians do, though I think their
digs are wittier than mine.
The need to ridicule this administration and its copycats
around the world has never been greater. The incompetence level in the handling
of the coronavirus is such that it is probably as much of a danger as the virus
itself. The most recent bout of “competence” from this administration was for
the President to tweet and publicise his support for protestors who were
protesting against “stay at home” orders in states which incidentally had
governors from the opposing party. The Trump chose to cast these protests as a
case of “liberty against tyranny,” with his tweets to “Liberate Virginia” and
so on. More can be found at:
In fairness to Trump, he’s not the only world leader to
protest against “Stay at home” orders. In South America’s most prominent nation,
the self-styled “Trump of the Tropics,” Mr. Jair Bolsonaro has been doing pretty
much the same thing. Brazil’s President has downplayed the virus and urged Brazilians
to ignore social distancing measures introduced by his own health ministry. More
can be found at:
Both the Original and Tropical versions are clearly doing
something dreadful. I get it, “stay at home” orders are not good for the
economy. Businesses like retailers, particularly your mom and pop shops are
going to take a beating if nobody is going out and spending money. I also get
it that being cooped up at home can be maddening. This blog post is being written
while I’m at home.
Having said that, if it’s a choice between having less money
and not catching a highly infectious virus that kills people, most people would
choose the former. More importantly, most people would expect their leaders to protect
lives. I think of the late Steve Jobs who once said, “There’s no point being
the richest guy in the cemetery.”
Social distancing, stay at home orders and so on have been
proven to be effective measures against this highly contagious virus. Taiwan
and Hong Kong, which are next to China implemented such measures early on have 420
cases with 6 deaths and 1,026 cases and four deaths respectively. Vietnam, a
poor communist country with a weak healthcare system implemented shut downs
early on and at the time of writing has 268 cases with no fatalities.
Should anyone feel that I am being biased in my myopic East
Asian view, there are also examples of “Caucasian” countries that have handled
the virus intelligently by implementing the same measures. New Zealand is a
shinning example with 1,105 cases and 12 deaths. If you need an example of a
big country that has managed the virus well, there’s Germany which has an admittedly
high number of cases at 145,184 but a relatively lower number of fatalities
at 4,586.
Nobody has made digs at Germany or New Zealand in this
situation because they’ve handled the situation responsibly. By comparison, one
should be making digs at America, which stands out as a “World Leader” with
764,177 cases and 40,591 fatalities. To put that number into perspective, the
USA has lost 2,216 in the ongoing war in Afghanistan and 4,576 in the 2003 Iraq
War (figures including the occupation which ended in 2011). So, when you look
at these numbers and then at the efforts of the “Commander in Chief” to
undermine the very things that have kept the infection rates down, is at best a
travesty (what becomes more ridiculous is the fact that a certain section of
America would accuse you of being a “left wing conspiracy nut job who is
naturally biased against this president”)
The same is true for Trump’s Brazilian counterpart, who only
gets less publicity because Brazil doesn’t quite command the same global
attention as the USA (except during the Soccer World Cup and whenever the
Amazon Forrest burns). Brazil’s statistics at 38,645 cases and 2,462 fatalities
are also less significant than the US figures, though as the US example showed,
infection rates can and do sky rocket (it took around three months for the US
to become a world beater in covid-19 cases and fatalities.)
I’ve always maintained that the US has been on the balance of
things, a benevolent power. However, when you have a situation where you have a
pandemic, making thousands of people deathly ill, your health care system is
being overwhelmed and you have your “leader” undermining the measures that have
been proven to keep infections under control, then, I’m sorry, you cannot
expect people not to mock you. Nobody is going to take you seriously as a world
leader worthy of respect if you make it a point to undermine the solution when
the problem is so large and you convince people that questioning your actions
is a “left wing conspiracy.”
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