Can America be resurrected?

Donald Trump is not the cause of America's decline into a fascist state.  He is a symptom, the result of something that happened to the American people.  He is the means through which people who reject the notion "that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights" are dismantling the republic.  His tactics are in their extreme phase with the firing of seven inspectors general whose job it is to keep the federal government honest and fair.  After national attempts to increase voting participation by making the process more accessible and convenient, Trump and his minions have been systematically making it more difficult and out-of-reach for people who do not have the advantages of power and wealth.  

Trump was elected and works at the behest of people who hate and wish to destroy the basic premise on which America was designed to operate.  Inequality is now the ruling premise.  Trump has announced that he, not the the states, has the sole power to decide when the nation can open open up again after the mass quarantine.  The governors, and the U.S Constitution,  disagree, but his declaration is evidence of the totalitarian mindset with which he and his supporters try to govern.  While there is resistance to the efforts to curtail democracy, damage has been done.  That segment of the population that doesn't like democracy has made headway with Trump holding the presidency.  The electorate who believes in American democracy tends to forget that there is significant faction that does not.  

The news this past week has covered the social-distance provisions being put forward by governments throughout the nation.  The hard fact is that the only means we have at this time to control Covid-19 is limiting contact with fellow humans.  In order to have liberty and to pursue happiness, one has to have life.  Restrictions placed on human contacts are an effort to provide the right to life in the face of a virus that is lethal.  But the latest news casts show people protesting the restrictions on human gatherings to prevent the spread of the virus.  Those protesters seem oblivious to the fact that the preservation of life is at issue and that liberty and their pursuit of happiness is conditioned upon the right to life.  They openly disregard that there is virus killing people that we don't know much about as yet and they disrespect the measures to prevent people from being afflicted with the virus.  This is the mentality that  can't deal with the fact that more than 4,500 are dying from the virus each day, and the death toll is mounting every day.

The latest studies in tracing the course of the disease shows that people can carry and spread the virus days before they show symptoms of the disease, and to get a command over the disease will require extensive testing, tracing of points of viral exchange, and the development of medicines, including vaccines, to control the disease.  But until those measures are developed, people will have to stay away from each other.  Some people resent that they are being deprived of their liberty, but they have no respect or concerns for the lives being put at risk.

They taunt, "Don't you want the country opened up?"  No one wants the country closed down, but the question is do they want corpses left to rot in the streets, as has been experienced in Ecuador, or bodies stacked in closets, as happened in an American nursing home?    Trump's defenders display a dismissive attitude toward the lives of their fellow Americans.  Louisiana Senator John Kennedy said, "This isn’t a question of not valuing life. This is a question of making a hard decision with the cold, hard facts.”

Adolph Hitler faced those cold, hard facts in 1939.  Sen. Kennedy suggests the same conclusion.  Hitler regarded the "incurably ill, physically or mentally disabled, emotionally distraught, and elderly people" as having a “life unworthy of living.”  Kennedy seems to make the same dismissal.  Hitler's solution was to implement the T4 Euthanasia Program, the implementation of which led to the use of gas ovens and the mass extermination of six million Jews--the Holocaust.

 Declarations that some people are expendable are the foundations on which gas ovens are built.

When decisions are made by leaders that it is okay to sacrifice some people in order to open up the economy, the nation is following the precedent set by Hitler.  The question is if the nation even wants to reject that precedent. Or is even capable of doing so.