COVID-19 has come into my inner circle. I found out a friend is showing symptoms, but won’t know the results of the test until Sunday or Monday. Then I found out someone I had worked closely with has a loved one on her way to the emergency room showing COVID-19 symptoms. All within an hour of one another.
Over the past two days, as I’ve watched the pandemic unfold across greater swaths of our country, more people testing positive, and the death toll rising, I have wondered what the man in the Oval Office would do, if heaven forbid, he tested positive and began showing symptoms of Coronavirus.
Would he begin to regret any of the things he has done over his lifetime, like:
- Refusing to pay small business for work they’ve completed.
- Hiring undocumented workers, while ranting and causing harm to the undocumented.
- Sexually harassing or assaulting several women.
- Attempting to bribe (quid pro quo) an ally to lie about a political adversary.
- Calling COVID-19 a hoax.
- Refusing to use the Defense Production Act until it was too late to stop people from getting sick and dying.
- Allowing the EPA to relax its standards so big business can pollute, basically at will.
- Gaslighting and lying to no end and for no actual reason.
- Issuing a signing statement saying he will not abide to the oversight portion of the $500,000,000,000 going to big businesses.
- Locking thousands of refuges seeking asylum in cages, along with taking their children from them and losing some of those children in the system.
- Refusing to honor legal subpoenas.
- Refusing to release his tax returns.
- Refusing to honor social norms, morals and ethics.
- Refusing to honor the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution, and is profiting greatly and illegally while in office.
- Showing no sympathy, empathy, nor compassion towards any human being.
- Buddying-up to dictators and tyrants.
- Caring only about people who “bend the knee” towards him.
- Doing all he can to destroy our Democracy.
Would he finally feel empathy for the great suffering of so many Americans, regretting his refusal to listen to the intelligence, to science, and the Federal Government‘s own pandemic plan?.
Would he actually feel what his constituents are feeling right now as they lie in hospital beds, barely able to breath, not able to have family around them at what is most likely the scariest thing to happen to them in their lifetimes, wondering if there will be a ventilator for them, worrying whether they’ve infected their loved ones, and will they survive this virus that is working to destroy their bodies?
I wonder if such an experience would bring a change to him as many tragedies do to so many of us. Might he show compassion? Might he realize his life has been a series of torments wrought towards his fellow human beings. Might he see the world as it is, not what he has only experienced in his privileged life.
Everyday I work to put lightness and healing energy into the world. I pray this virus stops spreading and the many people affected right now heal quickly and permanently. I pray for the families with sick loved ones and hope they can stay strong for their ill loved ones. My prayers are filled with thoughts of the hundreds of thousands whom are sick with COVID-19, the thousands fighting for their lives in hospitals who lack what is needed to treat them, the families of all of these poor souls, and for the millions of us who live in fear of contracting the Virus and of what our government is doing to us as we hunker down in fear.
Stay safe, stay well my friends!
[Update: My friends test came back negative! Still waiting to hear about my other friend’s loved one.]
Personal Reflections of a Middle-Aged Man 