America’s Burning Heart: Trump’s Immoral Geography of Caring
It feels as if the “United” part of the term, United States, is being consumed by an array of fires — the forest and wild fires and the blaze of civic outrage erupting everywhere. In our national government’s response to the infernos across and down the western coast of this nation, there is indifference and even disdain. After all, Washington, Oregon, and California are “blue states”. They don’t count in Donald Trump’s self-interest calculations. They’re just “Democrat” states.
Any visit by President Trump to the West Coast is just an expedient side-trip from his Nevada fund-raising effort, designed to posture for his base and generate a few photo ops. Any expression of believable empathy for the suffering of the 47 million residents of Oregon, Washington, and California will be about a tenth as much as he’s demonstrated so far for nearly 200,000 Covid-19 victims and military veterans who’ve died or been injured in the service of our nation.
We just memorialized another 9/11 Anniversary. Despite the infinite sadness of the day, it seemed routine and anti-climactic. Our expressions of communal empathy for the many physical and spiritual maladies currently afflicting our nation are more like continuing sighs of exhaustion.
In what seems like a very distant past, in major calamities affecting our nation, our people had almost always come to the aid of disaster victims regardless of the region or state they were located. It never mattered whether it was tornados, Mississippi River flooding, hurricanes, earthquakes, industrial accidents, acts of terrorism, or an epidemic. Help or personnel from states all over the nation were expected and arrived if needed.
We don’t say to people in New Orleans that they’re at fault for their exposure to frequent flooding or storm damage because they live in a low-lying area. We don’t tell people in Florida “tough luck” if they’re devastated by a hurricane. We don’t tell people in Tornado Alley, which includes such states as Iowa, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Nebraska, and Ohio, that they should know better than to put themselves in harm’s way. The nation’s taxpayers support a system of levees, locks, and dams to mitigate, with mixed success, the extent and frequency of damage to the many communities along the Mississippi River.
You get the picture.
Today, in the Era of Trump, as the fires ravage our nation’s west coast states, we have our president babbling about how the Western states have neglected to “clean” and “rake” the forest floor. He threatens to cut off some unspecified stream of money to California. At the same time, President Trump blusters about sending federal troops and agents into Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Oakland, and Los Angeles to deal with phantom hordes of Antifa looters and pillagers. What can we say about a president whose model of decision making seems to come out of the extortionists’ playbook? If you promise fealty to the House of Trump, you might get his support.
Americans beware, just in case you haven’t gotten the message: If disaster befalls a particular region, its political profile had best match the partisan or personal interests of the President, at least as long as Trump is in office. Otherwise your state, city, or community might be on its own in an emergency. Pity the millions of Republicans, deserted in Democratic-governed states and cities.
President Obama, in his election victory speech of 2008 said, “Americans who sent a message to the world that we have never been just a collection of individuals or a collection of red states and blue states. We are, and always will be, the United States of America.” Some might claim that President Obama was more hopeful than realistic when he made that speech. The physical and economic destruction of the fires layered on top of the colossal consequences of the Covid-19 crisis, robs us of the words to describe the malice of President Trump’s willfully divisive actions. Many of us no doubt wonder how close to the breaking point we’ve come.
