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The Braselton News
Wednesday, December 16, 2020
Opinion
Deferring to a toddler’s tantrum as pandemic rages
By Scott Thompson
The U.S. is now experiencing a daily
9/11 in terms of deaths from COVID-19,
and CDC director Robert Redfield has
said we should expect that trend to con
tinue for the next 60-90 days.
It may not be entirely apples to ap
ples, but when you consider how our
country would react if the coronavirus
were a foreign nation attacking us, the
response from our highest levels of
leadership and many citizens has been
something well short of that.
It’s difficult not to feel disgust toward
our state’s leadership that has ignored
White House Coronavirus Task Force
recommendations to enact a statewide
mask mandate and tougher measures
and has failed to adequately get out
ahead of what’s happening now and
what is about to happen. Like much of
the U.S., Georgia is reporting record
numbers of cases and hospitals are
stretched thin, teetering daily on the
brink of full capacity. And we haven’t
even gotten into the winter, which Red-
field and other officials have warned
will be the darkest time in American
public health history, even with encour
aging vaccine developments.
It’s especially difficult not to feel a
strong level of disgust toward the out
going president, and by extension his
enablers in his party, for responding to
the current reality by, as a friend put it
on social media, “ignoring the pandem
ic’s toll on lives, holding super-spreader
events and attacking the foundations of
democracy.”
Indeed, Donald Trump continues to
ignore the bomb that is going off across
the country so he can air falsehoods and
grievances about his loss in an election
that he effectively pissed away.
“We’re all victims,” he told a crowd
of maskless supporters at a recent rally
in Valdosta, one of his latest events bor
dering on — I’m using this term loosely
— criminal negligence.
The GOP’s response to Trump’s cru
sade of idiocy has ranged from encour
agement, to silence, to muted opposi
tion, to very little strong pushback. Not
everyone in the party is willing to dive
off this cliff. Quite a handful of lead
ing Republican officials have refused to
cave in to his demands and for the most
part stood their ground.
But that wisdom and decency clear
ly doesn’t extend to all. U.S. senators
David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler and
Congressman Jody Hice (whose district
includes Barrow County), all of whom
claim to be acting in service of their
state’s best interests, threw their back
ing behind the Texas attorney general’s
baseless efforts to overthrow the will of
the American people, who chose to elect
someone else other than Trump presi
dent. And there is a push in the Georgia
legislature, led largely by House Speak
er David Ralston, to throw Team Trump
a bone so they’ll stand down. Ralston
announced last week he would seek
legislation that would change the state’s
constitution to where the legislature —
not the actual people — elects the sec
retary of state, a clear reactionary mea
sure to Joe Biden’s victory in Georgia
and Republican Secretary of State Brad
Raffensperger’s refusal to illegally nul
lify it at Trump’s demand.
You can argue about whether the po
sition should be an elected or an ap
pointed one, but this never seemed to be
an issue when Democratic presidential
candidates weren’t winning the state
the last few elections. It didn’t seem to
bother Ralston when the current gover
nor served as secretary of state for most
of the year- he was elected to the office.
And the change is all but certain to
fail to achieve the two-thirds vote it
needs from the House and Senate and
the approval of voters to become a re
ality. But that’s not the point here. The
intent from Ralston here seems to be
appeasing Trump and his zealots so
they’ll quit bothering him while he at
tempts to throw Raffensperger and his
office under the bus. It’s a stunning
level of cowardice that, as noted in this
space before, rules the day among GOP
leaders’ approach to Trump.
And that brings us back to the party’s
response to the pandemic and how so
much of it is dictated by Trump and
his cult of personality — and the in
escapable truth behind where we are
now. Had Trump, from day one, taken
the posture toward the pandemic like
almost any other previous president
would have, so many lives would have
been saved. Trump, from the outset,
could have mobilized an aggressive,
science- and data-driven response, with
a man-on-the-moon-mission mentality.
And, despite today’s GOP’s often an
ti-science bent, most Republicans and
many more Trump supporters would
have fallen in line with mask mandates
and more stringent measures aimed at
saving lives. It would not have alle
viated all the pain and suffering, but
it stands to reason we would be in a
whole hell of a lot better place than we
are now.
And as much credit as Trump has re
ceived over the last four years from the
media, including myself at times, for
having strong “political instincts,” this
approach would have been his most di
rect path to being fairly easily re-elect
ed. But he screwed it up royally out of
ego, narcissism, paranoia and a general
lack of humanity.
It’s sad that many don’t recognize
that and never will. And it’s shameful
and pathetic that there are people in
positions of power and influence who
know that to be the case but choose to
stand idly by and oblige a toddler’s tan
trum while the nation continues to reel.
Scott Thompson is editor of the Bar-
row News-Journal, a sister newspa
per of The Braselton News. He can be
reached at sthompson@barrownews-
journal.com.
Can’t think of a Christmas gift — how about a globe?
By Zach Mitcham
A huge meteor landed on Indonesia — at least it
appears so on my globe that I keep by my recliner.
There was a planetary disaster in our living room
about a year ago, and this “earth” was bruised by my
clumsiness.
I hold that globe often. It entertains me. No, I’m not
good at geography. I know some things, but not that
much. But holding a globe for an extended period is
a kind of mental game. I often have my phone next
to me while I do this. What does the 12,000-foot Mt.
Erebus look like in Antarctica at the bottom of the
earth next to the Ross Ice Shelf? Pretty cool, actually.
You can find images of that volcano erupting against
the icy backdrop. It looks otherworldly. What about
Reunion Island off Madagascar' in the Indian Ocean?
Well, kind of cool, too. I discovered there’s a highway
extending into the ocean around part of the volcanic
island. Look it up.
There’s so much to study on a globe. I always find
something new. And most of us can’t travel like we
might want. But with a globe and a phone, you can
explore in a certain way. I recommend it.
Sometimes I leave the phone in the bedroom and
just hold the world and think of scale and of history.
One inch on that globe is 660 miles. I make an inch
with my thumb and index finger and touch the Pacific
Ocean. Man, the Pacific is a beast. We all know this,
but how often do you really contemplate the distance?
It’s a harsh, unforgiving wilderness to a human with
out the protection of modern technology — and even
sometimes with that protection, right? The Pacific is
a huge hunk of this earth, and it is a vast, wet horizon
for thousands of miles.
And then there are the dots, those little islands out in
the nothingness. Unless you hold a globe and study it,
you might not appreciate how many islands are in the
Pacific and how isolated they are. For instance, find
Caroline island on a map and think about living there
among its 131,200 people. Imagine how removed its
citizens must feel from the rest of the world.
I’ve been thinking about the Pacific as I watch a
Netflix series on WWII. Of course, that series deals
with the European theatre of war, too. And along
those lines, I have been looking at the globe with that
time period in mind. I’m looking a lot at Volgograd,
formerly Stalingrad. The battle between Hitler and
Stalin for the town the Russian despot named for him
self was one of the most brutal conflicts in world his
tory. The crudest leaders think nothing of human life
outside of their own. Hitler and Stalin were willing to
sacrifice anyone for their own glory, and Stalingrad
is evidence of this, with two million casualties from
Soviet and Axis forces. The Germans bombed the city
to rubble, then nearly finished off the Russians. But
then winter set in, and Stalin stealthily moved mas
sive forces behind the Germans, blocking their pas
sage out of the city and back to Germany. Thousands
of German soldiers froze and starved to death with
Hitler demanding that they never surrender, despite
their slow and torturous death to the elements. Think
ing of this history, I imagine the reality of one little
dot on the globe for millions of people at that time. I
search the city online, then and now.
And, of course, I’m thinking of Pearl Harbor this
week, too, “a day that will live in infamy,” which
also happens to be my birthday. My grandfather, who
fought in the Philippines, and whose ship was hit by a
kamikaze pilot, was doubled that my birth fell on that
day, which is also the date of the Winecoff hotel fire
that claimed the life of his niece in 1946, but my mom
told him that my birth gave them something good to
think of on that day.
The Netflix series is interesting, because it address
es some of the Japanese thinking behind the attack. It
seems random, right? But there was some back sto
ry. For instance, Japan established itself as a military
force in in the Russo-Japanese War of 1905 and helped
secure the Pacific against the Germans in WWI. But
despite its military might, Japanese leadership felt be
littled by Western countries that conrtolled much of
the Pacific. And as the global economy collapsed in
the Great Depression, Japan sought to secure “Asia
for Asians” under Japanese imperial rule. They pro
moted the “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,”
which sought to create a “block of Asian nations led
by the Japanese and free of Western powers.” With
this in mind, the expansionist Japanese invaded Man
churia, a barbaric military assault roundly opposed by
the West. But Japan saw hypocrisy in Western nations
controlling Asian territories, while opposing Japan’s
imperialist aims.
Militant nationalism was like a virus spreading
across the globe at that time, and Japan was sick with
it, too. They sought to kill their way to prosperity and
glory and aligned with Hitler.
When Japan decided to go to war with the United
States, Isoroku Yamamoto, Japanesse Marshal Admi
ral of the imperial Japanese Navy, and the architect
of Pearl Harbor, thought fighting the U.S. was crazy.
He had attended Harvard from 1919-21 and perhaps
his time in the U.S. gave him perspective on why an
attack was bad. But Yamamoto decided that if war
with the U.S. was inevitable, then Japan needed to go
truly offensive and wipe out U.S. naval and air power
before America could enter the conflict. This would
then allow the Japanese to grab more territory in the
Pacific. Yamamoto ordered 30 ships, 408 planes and
16,000 men to travel 4,000 miles across the Pacific
on a secret mission to attack the U.S. at Pearl Harbor.
Just think of such a mission now with all of our so
phisticated surveillance technology. Impossible. But
the Japanese managed to go undetected and catch the
U.S. off guard. They killed 2,403 U.S. military per
sonnel and 68 civilians. But that historic attack awoke
a giant. The U.S. was in it for real at that point.
If you hold a globe, look at Japan, then look at Ha
waii. Think of all those lives fighting across the vast
space of ocean. And think about how poor the navi
gational and radar technology was compared to now.
Then find the little island of Midway on a globe. A
monumental WWII battle took place in the Pacific
around that island. It’s fascinating to me that squad
rons of U.S. pilots were flying aimlessly at sea over
the water, unable to find the Japanese, with the bat
tle appealing won for Japan, when two sets of U.S.
planes almost simultaneously found the dots against
the vast nothingness and dove down to decimate the
Japanese. I hold the globe, look at all that blue, and
think of those moments when pilots surely felt lost or
low on fuel. If you ran out of gas, you crashed into
the sea. The Pacific, in my mind, represents isolation.
And I think of my own grandfather, Wilson Benjamin
Mitcham, hying to hold onto his life — and ultimately
mine — out in that vast ocean loneliness.
But all of this is just one line of thought while hold
ing a globe. I can find the Bering Strait and get carried
away thinking about the Ice Age and how thousands
of year's ago, small groups of people crossed from Si
beria, seeking a better life. Their journey led to many
Native American societies in North and South Amer
ica. Think of all the people who lived and died here
before this land was even “discovered” from across the
Atlantic. There is something about holding the “earth”
that brings these narratives into sharper view.
If you have someone on your Christmas list who
seems to think similarly to me, then you’d probably do
OK getting them a globe if they don’t have one already.
It’s fun to hold the world if you’re willing to sit and
think.
Zach Mitcham is editor of The Madison County
Journal, a sister newspaper of The Braselton News.
He can be reached at zach@mainstreetnews.com.
The Braselton News
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Wesleigh Sagon Photographer/Features
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