Yet in my semi-compulsive news browsing, I have discovered a few things. First, it appears that Trump has finally stopped blocking the Biden transition (even though he still falsely claims that the election was stolen, which it wasn't). Second, it appears that Biden is picking a capable and competent leadership team to assist in cleaning up the monstrous mess left by Trump. Third, it also sadly appears that the United States remains deeply divided.
As I wrote previously, this division is the result of America's original sins combined with the engineering of a right-wing social movement over the last 45 years - a movement aided and abetted by a powerful right-wing media machine exemplified by the media empire of Rupert Murdoch. And one of the sharpest evidences of this division is the national response to the COVID-19 pandemic. By now, the states known as red states all have higher levels of COVID-19 infection than those states classified as blue states. And the most conservative of the western or prairie or mountain states have the highest levels of COVID-19 infection in the nation (and in the world). (See this also.) These states also contain populations whose flawed notions of liberty make them the most resistant to science-based guidelines for reducing the risk of infection.
Some of those stories of resistance to science are truly breathtaking. We have Republican governors finally, grudgingly, mandating that people in their states start wearing masks. Yet these mask mandates have so many loopholes that they are effectively worthless. We also have public health officials in a town in Wyoming who were shouted down by angry residents during a recent meeting in which these officials were discussing ways to limit the explosive spread of COVID-19. We have widespread regions of the United States in which the wearing of a mask is seen as a personal affront to "conservative" values. We have a U.S. Supreme Court whose newest member has helped to eviscerate the ability of states to impose limits on religious gatherings in order to limit the spread of COVID. We have an upstart right-wing "news" network (a network that is even farther out in fantasy land than Fox News) which was recently suspended from YouTube for falsely claiming a "guaranteed cure" for COVID-19. And we have people in red states who are dying right now in hospitals, yet who refuse to believe that it is COVID-19 that is killing them. According to a South Dakota nurse interviewed by CNN, "They tell you there must be another reason they are sick. They call you names and ask why you have to wear all that 'stuff' [personal protective equipment, or PPE] because they don't have COVID because it's not real. Yes. This really happens." There are nurses in other parts of the country who tell similar stories of being harassed (and even coughed and spit on) by Trump supporters and other right-wing types who are hospitalized.
And that last item reminds me of the power of cultic thinking. For it appears obvious by now that the people who identify as members of the Global Far Right or who are aligned with white supremacy or whose worldview has been shaped by right-wing media have all the hallmarks of people who have been indoctrinated into a cult. One of the hallmarks of a cult is that it convinces its members that the cult is good even while the cult is actually killing them. It boggles the mind that there are actually patients in hospitals in the rural U.S. right now who are insulting the doctors and nurses who are taking care of them because these doctors and nurses actually dare to wear PPE. It's almost as mind-boggling to read of patients who are dying of COVID-19, yet who refuse to acknowledge this fact. A deathbed is a bad place to tell lies.
