Whatever Happened to Spartacus? (part 3)

(part 1)

(part 2)

By early summer of 2020, deaths in the United States from the still-unstopped coronavirus were already exceeding 125,000, barely a scant half-year since its first domestic toehold, with heavy prospects of deaths rising far, far higher. Most public gathering-places were just beginning to open again, although still to restricted numbers of patrons – e.g., restaurants and grocery stores and so on – and limited to drive-through and pick-up, etc., business.

I think the two biggest factors in the lack of control over the spread of the virus in the U.S. were two: 1) At-times too-timid response from the federal government, and most state governments, to more forcefully prohibit gatherings of people early on in order to bring down the transmission rate. (Note, though, that at the same time that ministers were being arrested for holding religious services, casinos were allowed to remain open – arguably bespeaking a clear governmental bias against spiritual expression, despite the First Amendment's free-exercise clause.)

As counterpoint, though: Americans have a poor history of following governmental mandates; one clear-and-simple case in point is the difficulty in emplacing universal requirements to just wear a motorcycle helmet... an obvious, sensible practice that shouldn't even be an issue. And so, very strong mandates to wear masks, and to (selectively) not congregate, wouldn't be followed to the degree they must be followed. Too many folks – particularly on the right – see such practical restrictions as curtailments of enshrined natural liberty... but it wasn't a matter of suppressing proud, individual citizens' freedom and independence; it was to ensure cooperation in protecting and saving the lives of many, many others.

This doesn't mean that laws and mandates should not have been emplaced – they most-definitely were needed, and should have been even stronger (and more consistent). They simply were spurned and not followed by people who were sure they knew better, and who were measuring clear common sense by how inconvenient common sense's dictates were to them. Many, many of these stubbornly unmasked people soon became cold statistics, underscoring the absolute necessity of such difficult mandates. The more sensible stayed at home, sanitized, wore masks... and waited for their next stimulus check.

2) Building on that, another obvious big vector of the virus's spreading even further was the series of protests over the cold murder of George Floyd by a police officer, as well as the shooting-death of Breonna Taylor by police, both these victims unarmed African-Americans. The two deaths clearly pointed out the entrenched racism in too many Caucasian-heavy metropolitan police forces. I supported the protestors, and the Black Lives Matter movement – so long as we include unborn black lives; anything less fosters racism, given that three times as many Black babies as Whites are killed in American abortions. With African-Americans comprising less than 13% of the American populace to White America's nearly 58%, some 39% of all American abortions are to Black mothers. These are Planned Parenthood's own statistics, via their Guttmacher Institute; it is immediately demonstrable that Planned Parenthood specifically targets the Black and Brown communities. And:

These protests and their movement lost my support once they turned to violence – especially in vandalism and looting of local businesses, and in murder (over two dozen lives were lost). The protest movement was hijacked by criminal opportunists, besmirching and supplanting the needful call for addressing and fighting against racism. You don't redress choking an innocent and helpless man... by torching a car dealership, by plundering and burning down dozens of businesses. We saw that same criminal idiocy three decades ago after the 1992 acquittal of a trio of Los Angeles police officers who had been witnessed and filmed brutally beating unarmed Rodney King. At least 63 people were killed over six days, nearly twice as many as were lost during the Watts anti-racism riots twenty-seven years earlier yet. We have learned nothing since then. And I say that from my firm personal stance against racism, against police brutality. We are capable of far, far better.

The initial 2020 protests, again, were understandable – yet also a) gathering hundreds of unmasked people together was stupid and unacceptable, regardless of the objective and cause; and b) months of seething tempers over being cooped up at home, over normal activities and businesses shut down, fed even more heat into the movement, contorting it into what became a disgraceful show of cathartic madness that did nothing to address what had been originally protested against: race-based murder and abuse by professionals trained and sworn to protect those very same people. I'd be interested to see reliable statistics on how many coronavirus deaths resulted specifically from those mass gatherings.

Oh, and the associated movement of Defund the Police was also stupid and short-sighted. Criminal police officers must be held fully accountable for their actions; likewise, their superiors who protect them. Suspend them and try them; if convicted, fire and jail them. Period. But shut down and remove the police entirely, and you've pulled the pin out of the live hand grenade that a lot of American inner cities and schools have become. Interestingly, and sensibly, in the two years since, communities have lately been quietly bringing police officers back into schools. They shouldn't be needed there in the first place. But the shamefully easy access of firearms to practically any young American, combined with ever-growing individual self-focus, means that our children are unsafe in what should be a very safe environment. That shouldn't surprise; babies aren't safe in their mother's wombs anymore, either – why wouldn't their older brothers and sisters (and grandparents, for that matter) be any less vulnerable to murder in this toxic, violent, arrogant, selfish culture?

Yes, this is still about our friend Spartacus, whose own outlook, I believe, has closely paralleled my own on matters of racial justice, and corruption in politics and the police. Here I've been laying out background and context, key elements of which a decades-long friendship has plenty. More shortly.