BY ROBBIE BROOKS
It’s night now here in Australia. It’s quiet. For the last few months that I’ve been here, I have felt safe from the clutches of America’s Covid problem. Sure, this disease has affected the entire world, but nothing can compare to the childish handling of it by the old U.S. of A. I think we should admit to ourselves now that the neighborly America has long vanished, but tensions have been at an all time high ever since Covid-19 revealed it’s ugly face.
I may now be safe in Australia, land of the people who for the most part took this pandemic seriously, but I was still in America for a lot of the ugly days. They told us it would go away. They lied. They told us we worried too much. Many died. And at the height of all this, cops still managed to shoot black men in the streets. One cop even choked a guy to death.
It was last May that George Floyd was killed by Derek Chauvin. And a lot of the Country rightfully responded. I was there in Salt Lake City on May 30th after the first car was flipped. Covid was still a concern, but human lives had other threats we wanted to call on. We masked up and got to work. It was there that bow and arrow guy drove into the crowd and aimed to kill someone before being beaten and escorted to safety by the police. They flipped and burned his car too, and all he got for attempted murder was a year in jail and a lot of Facebook comments. I remember the girl who was just standing there on the line before a cop shot her in the face with a paintball. Her life will never be the same.
Now almost a year later, the trial of Derek Chauvin is finally underway. But racism in America is still alive. And despite vaccines and new hopes for a better tomorrow, Covid is still here as well. Some things are just too hard to shake, I suppose. And guess who else is hard to shake? You know where this is going. The one they call Donald.
That’s my middle name, which pisses me off to no end. Robert Donald Brooks. If Nixon was a horror movie, then Donald Trump would be the filthy and unwatchable sequel where the original’s final girl is brutally murdered in the opening moments. If George Bush is the guy who will get to the front of the line into heaven, by tapping everyone on the shoulder so they look the other way long enough for him to sneak in front of them, Trump is the fucking animal who will have his minions shove the whole line down and blame it on the radical left. I could go on, but I want to keep my lunch down.
And so here we are, stuck with both Trump’s cult and the Covid-19 Virus. No matter what, they are linked together in history forever. So many have died because of both a sickness and a sick mind. I think that’s the real tragedy here. But alas, I’m now in Australia where masks aren’t even needed because they knew what they were doing here right from the beginning. I don’t have any need to worry, do I? But I’m still an American, dammit, and I know I’ll never forget. None of us will. And we’ll never forgive.
