Everybody in America should be outraged. But first, allow me to put outrage into personal context. You, too, may know others close to you whose situations apply.

A family loved one has a kidney condition. While not imminently critical, it’s serious enough that she followed nephrologists’ recommendation to enlist herself as a transplant candidate. Two immediate family members took blood tests to determine if either might be donor candidates. One is not compatible and the other is awaiting test results. (Full disclosure: I’m ineligible due to cardiac issues and relatively advanced age.)

This was concerning enough before the COVID-19 pandemic. But as hospitals in New York, where both donor candidates live, became overwhelmed, we learned that coronavirus patients placed on ventilators often also require dialysis. This resulted in critically ill kidney patients, unaffected by the virus, going untreated in a timely manner due to shortages of dialysis devices.

Thankfully, as the peak of the crisis subsides, for now, dialysis is again available to kidney patients regardless of positive or negative coronavirus status.

It’s terrible that doctors and nurses are put in positions of playing God to decide who’s most in need of dialysis and/or ventilators. But here’s the outrage, obscene in its flaunting: The simple courtesy of wearing a mask in public spaces while we’re all potential pandemic spreaders is beyond Trump’s warped sense of human decency. Because he literally and figuratively thumbs his bare nose at his own White House guidelines for “mitigation” that probably saved tens of thousands of lives—even as we approach 100,000 deaths due to this virus—Trump encourages fellow Americans, by his wishfully delusional example, to be reckless as we begin relaxing stay-at-home advisories. The president’s in-your-face arrogance led to an outbreak in his own home as both his valet and a vice-presidential aide tested positive.

To my unofficial account, the president has made only two truthful statements regarding the COVID-19 disaster—other than those scripted for him: “I’m not a doctor.” True. “I’m not going to wear a mask.” True, so far.

Trump believes wearing a mask signals weakness. In other words, he’s a wimp. That’s why before the White House outbreak, almost no one near the Oval Office wore masks. That his valet who serves him meals contracted the virus may account, in part, for Trump’s defiant proclamation that he’s now taking hydroxychloroquine as a preventative COVID medication. (Despite zero empirical evidence and against his own FDA recommendations.) Some believe he was telling the truth because until a few weeks ago he relentlessly promoted the medication approved for malaria and lupus. But I suspect his primary motivation had everything to do with the “60 Minutes” interview with Dr. Rick Bright the night before. Bright was until recently the point man in developing vaccines or treatments for COVID. But he was demoted to a less consequential position within the National Institutes for Health due to his reluctance to endorse Trump’s infatuation with this COVID-irrelevant drug.

Bright subsequently filed a whistleblower complaint.

I’ve previously speculated that Trump has a financial interest in hydroxychloroquine. But in this case, his interest in claiming to take the drug as a virus prophylactic seems overtly political. The president spends far too much time watching TV. Besides tweeting about this devastating expert eyewitness account of his incompetent handling of the greatest health crisis of the 21st century, Trump outed himself as a presidential guinea pig just to refute Bright.

We know what he thinks of whistleblowers and inspectors general. We doubt that First Fat-Boy would take medications to prove them wrong. My brief history of covering Donald, the real estate delinquent, suggests he hasn’t the courage even to fire apprentices who aren’t hired for the role of losers.

But my outrage is still focused on the mask issue. People demanding reopening of the economy are not wrong to be impatient. I can’t wait to go to my next baseball game or Broadway musical. We’re not close to that yet.

One protester near my old Long Island neighborhood shouted to a TV reporter, “You stopped covering the president’s briefings” in favor of interviewing Dr. Anthony Fauci, as if he were the enemy. Truth is, Trump stopped the briefings because advisers told him it wasn’t working for him.

At his next press conference, maybe Trump will say he’s taking Lysol to prevent COVID-19. He’ll blame the virus on Obama, Biden, Hillary, Comey, Mueller—the usual suspects. If you believe him, after all these death-baiting lies, shame on you. Because of the president’s careless disregard for safety in his remarks, focusing on what he calls a political hoax against his re-election, Americans may stop paying attention to necessary precautions.

What I wish for the next presidential event at which masks are required for everyone else is that Trump be required to wear one. If not, Mr. President, you can retire to a virtual appearance off premises. Period.

You never got it, Mr. President. This is NOT and NEVER WAS, about YOU. Almost everyone else gets it. I see it among my neighbors and I’m grateful for their respect to others. When they stop getting it, many more of us will die unnecessarily. It will be on you, Mr. President. Everyone knows you’ve been exposed to the virus. Everyone knows you don’t trust tests or understand anything about a positive or negative one day to the next. You wouldn’t know a vaccine from a vasectomy. Given your massive ignorance and incompetence, wear a damn mask or sequester yourself in front of your TV screens and tweet yourself into virtual oblivion, where you belong..

Steve Parks is a retired New York journalist now living in Easton.

First, let me offer a statement on which I hope we can all agree. We want the president to succeed. Moreover, it is not an overstatement to say our lives depend on it. More than 55,000 Americans have died of COVID-19. At current morbidity rates, that toll will be far exceeded by the time you read this.

Yes, we wish the president all the success he can muster. But wishes are very different than expectations. It’s not too much to expect our president to act in a timely and informed manner when facts point to a crisis. Until President Trump’s hand-picked national security adviser, John Bolton, disbanded it, the security team that briefs the president daily included a medical panel whose sole job was to detect emerging epidemics that might spread into an attack far more deadly than even 9/11. 

President Obama developed it. Trump dumped it. But, as Donald says, almost bragging, “I take no responsibility.”

It is the primary responsibility in the presidential oath of office to keep all of us safe from harm. President Trump points repeatedly to his China travel restriction on the last day of January as the difference between tens of thousands of U.S. deaths to as many as 2.2 million. Yet more than 40,000 eluded his ban.

In mid-January, when Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar tried to alert his boss to an impending disaster, Trump dismissed him as an “alarmist” and cited lifting restrictions on flavored vaping products, popular with kids, as more urgent. 

In February, the president hibernated. 

In March and April, he lied about or exaggerated the availability of COVID-19 testing and life-saving medical equipment while refusing to fully invoke the Defense Production Act to fill those gaps. On March 6 at the Center for Disease Control, he falsely claimed, “Anyone that wants a test can get one”—while boasting, “Every one of these doctors said, ‘How do you know so much about this stuff.’ Maybe I have a natural ability,” and extolling a “super-genius” uncle who was, in fact (rare for Donald), an MIT professor. 

The self-described “stable genius” offered this “I’m-not-a-doctor” medical opinion in an April 23 coronavirus briefing: “I see the disinfectant that knocks [the virus] out in a minute, one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning? As you see, it gets in the lungs, it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it would be interesting to check in on that.” 

As usual, Trump had skipped the task force meeting prior to the briefing.

Any of us who’ve raised children recall child-proof locks on cupboards containing bleach and other poisonous cleaning solutions. By the time kids reach a certain age, they figure out locks. But even 10-year-olds know better than to swallow Clorox. Maybe Trump confused Clorox with his previous favorite “cure”—hydroxychloroquine. (Federal and state governments stockpiled 10s of millions of doses of the malaria-and-lupus treatment, making it scarce for those who need it.)

Trump’s spokeswoman and Fox News acolytes said the president was taken out of context—begging the question: In what context is this appropriate? Trump later said he was being sarcastic in a twisted attempt to trick “Fake News” reporters. Anyone who reviews the briefing on video knows he directed his remarks to Dr. Deborah Birx, who feebly said fever might substitute for ultraviolet heat as a treatment. 

Here’s the true context for the president’s incomprehensibly stupid and dangerous remarks. Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican, cited hundreds of calls by Marylanders who wondered if there was any merit to Trump’s speculation.

None!!!

Grasping at straws for any silver lining, Trump invited to this calamitous briefing William Bryan, acting undersecretary of science, Department of Homeland Security. Bryan, whose background is in infrastructure—not health or science—was the subject of an investigation into whistleblower complaints that he massaged federal policy to benefit himself financially, then lying to Congress about it. The Senate rejected his nomination for a permanent post. At the briefing, acting-so-and-so Bryan said ultraviolet light and disinfectants are useful in killing virus on surfaces—inanimate ones, like your kitchen counter. He then overstretched that legitimate finding by theorizing summer heat and sun rays might kill the virus.

The president immediately leapt to a conclusion he hoped would “trump” Dr. Anthony Fauci’s declaration that COVID-19 will return in the fall—directly disputing Trump’s wishful thinking. (Joe Biden offered this astute advice to his 2020 presidential rival: “Stop thinking out loud.”)

Meanwhile, CDC director Dr. Robert Redfield’s warned that a coronavirus comeback combined with a vigorous flu season would mean a “difficult” fall and winter. Trump set himself up for further rebuttal by declaring that CNN had “totally misquoted” Redfield—actually it was the Washington Post; Trump heard about it on CNN because he’s allergic to reading—the CDC director said unequivocally that he was quoted accurately. Trump glowered, not quite socially distanced, on the podium. 

The president faces a November election with an unrelenting pandemic possibly ticking toward 100,000 deaths and an economy that, no matter what “reopening” occurs, will be limping along at an employment rate above 10 percent. Such Trump zealots as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingram—but not many Republicans running for re-election—obscenely suggest that Democrats are rooting for high body counts and jobless numbers. 

No one wants that. It could be your father or grandfather, your mother or grandmother, sister or brother, wife or husband, even your kid who becomes a grim personal statistic.

We need a leader. Donald Trump, crossing his arms like a grumpy Mr. Clean, is no leader. We wish him the best, expecting the worst. Most of his monotone condolences delivered during pathologically narcissistic briefings are scripted. He’s incapable of authentic empathy. And because he never admits to mistakes—we all make mistakes—he cannot learn from them.

Steve Parks is a retired journalist now living in Easton.

BY STEVE PARKS

The 50th anniversary of Earth Day on April 22 figured to spark a global outpouring of humanity taking to the streets to demand immediate and even radical action against the existential threat of climate change on life as we know it.

But a pandemic got in the way. So, that’s not going to happen, although we will see a virtual Earth Day across the digital world. 

We’re told by authorities to listen to medical science and alter our lives fundamentally by staying home from work, from school and from every activity involving people who don’t live at home with us. Americans with any common sense, most of us, thankfully, are following those recommendations.

Science also tells us we should pay attention to the climatic effects of human activity—essentially burning fossil fuel—by taking profound steps to curb our collective carbon footprint. Staying on our current over-consumptive path inevitably would prove even more globally suicidal than ignoring the dangers of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Ironically, the pandemic and worldwide response has resulted in a temporary holiday from the atmospheric march toward carbon suffocation. Skies are clearer today over Los Angeles than they’ve been since long before smog first became a Southern California health threat in the 1940s. Commuting time by car from Long Island to Manhattan is cut in half with no need to resort to HOV lanes. And weekend Bay Bridge traffic, even as spring warms up, say, sometime after April 22, will likely be delay free. 

This, of course, is not a sustainable circumstance. Nor does anyone want it to be. But we could achieve, if not free-flowing freeways, air quality similar to the current virus-imposed aberration by switching en masse to electric vehicles. And that’s just one step we could take. I’m sure many of the millions who would’ve been attending in-person Earth Day events have more ideas about how to keep our planet habitable for human beings.

It’s easy to feel discouraged in the face of a presidential administration intent on making air and water dirtier by ordering regulatory freedom for corporations to poison and pollute. But Earth Day isn’t just an excuse for “tree-huggers,” as pollution apologists once labeled friends of the environment, to shout slogans and brandish pickets. The first Earth Day started a movement that led to passage of such landmark laws in the United States as the Clean Air, Clean Water and Endangered Species acts. All those are now under threat.

“Despite amazing success and decades of environmental progress, we find ourselves facing an even more dire, almost existential set of global challenges, from loss of biodiversity to climate change to plastic pollution that call for action at all levels of government,” says Denis Hayes, organizer of the first Earth Day in 1970.

Among the seminal influences that led to the first Earth Day and, in the same year, creation of the Cabinet-level Environmental Protection Agency by the Nixon administration, was the 1962 publication of “Silent Spring” by Rachel Carson. Documenting the adverse environmental impact of indiscriminate use of pesticides, the book inspired public pressure resulting in the ban of DDT for agricultural purposes. While “Silent Spring” was firmly based on science, it was most popularly known for its opening chapter, which Carson called “a fable for tomorrow.” A composite of true stories, the “fable” illustrated deleterious, sometimes deadly effects of DDT on wildlife, birds, bees, farm animals, pets and humans. It envisioned a spring with no birds to sing and, without bees to pollinate, no flowers to bloom.

Carson’s book also advocated reforms within democratic governments to encourage citizens, individually or in groups, to question what those in power permit others to inject into our environment. She didn’t live to see the far-reaching effects of “Silent Spring.” Carson died of breast cancer in Silver Spring, Md., two years after her book was published.

Now, on the eve of Earth Day’s 50th anniversary, Kathleen Rogers, president of Earth Day Network, acknowledges, “Progress has slowed, climate change impacts grow and our adversaries become better financed. We find ourselves today in a world facing threats that demand a unified global response. For 2020, we will build a new generation of environmental activists, engaging millions of people worldwide.”

By sheer coincidence, Article 28 of the Paris Agreement on climate change, signed by nearly every nation on Earth (197), the earliest effective date for U.S. withdrawal, announced by President Donald Trump, is the day after the U.S. presidential election. American voters can, for all practical purposes, nullify Trump’s order on Nov. 3.

Meanwhile, you can participate in the first-ever virtual Earth Day here.

Steve Parks is a retired journalist now living in Easton.

A lot has changed since my March 17 “Trump Lacks the Leadership Gene” was posted. The day before that Spy op-ed piece appeared, I added a hopeful addendum after the president declared a national emergency on March 13: “As I finished this commentary . . . President Trump suddenly got serious at a press conference, though he later tweeted snarky complaints about two governors and the New York Times. Trump has not yet earned the benefit of our doubt. But let’s hope he rises to the occasion, however belatedly.”

Since then, the president has only sunk deeper in the mire of incompetence and dishonesty regarding his tragic mishandling of the pandemic. Surgeon General Jerome Adams declared on “Meet the Press” that the week between Palm Sunday and Easter “is going to be our Pearl Harbor moment,” echoed by the warning of “really disturbing” days ahead by Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The White House had no scheduled coronavirus task force briefing at the time. But when the president changed his mind following such dire predictions by government medical experts, an important announcement was widely expected.

Instead, we got even more drivel than usual. 

In all likelihood, Trump added this last-minute briefing in order to obliviate Joe Biden’s virtual town hall, scheduled for the same hour, 7 p.m. Sunday, with his wife, Jill, a PhD in education.  

For three years, many Americans have wondered what would happen if and when Trump faced a real crisis—one not of his own making. Now we know. 

Trump has failed America.

Yes, we should all get behind the president in a time of crisis. But now it may be too late to matter. The virus will take its course. All we can do is heed the experts, stay home and pray for the sick, the healers and governors, Maryland’s included, who get what it is to lead in a crisis.

I don’t have a mask. But I’ll wear whatever I can find to cover my face next time I go to the supermarket. My next doctor’s appointment will be via Zoom. Trump can’t even manage to fake support for recommendations by his own team. There’s little attention to social distancing at his briefings. He still refuses to order nationwide shelter-in-place. And he all but mocked the latest recommendation—yes, it was a voluntary one—by declaring he wouldn’t wear a mask, suggesting he’d look silly to visiting potentates. Worse, he belittled science indicating that even assuming perfect compliance with social-distancing, stay-at-home and other prudent precautions, the minimum range of U.S. deaths we can expect is 100,000 to 240,000. That’s what disease models show—to which Trump remarked that he’s not involved in modeling, adding “not that kind of model.” As if this is an appropriate time and place for an off-color joke, which in the context is obscene.

Nor was it the time or place to blast still another governor for complaining about the federal response to pleas for life-saving ventilators and protective medical equipment. “There’s a governor, I hear him complaining all the time. Pritzker [Illinois Gov. Jay Pritzker]. He has not performed well.”

Trump conceded that the country is in for one of the “toughest weeks” yet. But he also called the 1.6 million tests conducted so far in the United States as the most in the world—surpassing Italy or South Korea. As “Morning Joe” Scarborough pointed out, “It’s like saying California did more tests than Delaware.” A day later Trump lied that testing was not the federal government’s responsibility, after weeks of lying that testing was available to “everyone who wants one.” We’ve subsequently learned that Trump was warned by trade adviser Peter Navarro in January that up to a million Americans would die in a pandemic without decisive action.

Trump squandered at least a two-month heads-up.

The president still brags about blocking flights from China, though 40,000 passengers got through anyway, and about hospitals being “thrilled” at supplies they’re receiving from his administration, while his own Health and Human Services report by the department’s inspector general reveals a starkly different reality. Nurses demonstrate outside New York hospitals, holding photos of colleagues killed by the virus. Meanwhile, Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, a know-nothing slumlord—just ask his Essex, Md., tenants—claims the national stockpile of vital medical equipment belongs to the federal government, not the states. To prove Kushner right, the “national stockpile” definition was amended on the White House website the next day.

Expect the HHS inspector general to be fired on the heels of the dismissal of the IG who referred the whistleblower complaint that led to Trump’s impeachment. (Yes, the president’s supporters still use that excuse for his viral inattention when the true fault is that he fires almost everyone around him who tells him what he doesn’t want to hear. In any case, he doesn’t read, doesn’t listen.)

But most suspect in his Palm Sunday briefing was the 29 million doses of hydroxychloroquine Trump says were added to the stockpile. Based on no credible scientific evidence, he’s relentlessly touted the anti-malarial drug as a possible COVID-19 treatment. Navarro, like Trump a medical amateur, had the temerity to challenge Fauci about the drug’s efficacy in a tense exchange at a task force meeting. When Trump repeated his plug at the briefing, reporters challenged him, to which he spun more out-loud wishful thinking. When Fauci finally appeared at the podium, a CNN reporter pointedly sought his opinion on the drug as a coronavirus treatment. Trump stepped forward before Fauci could speak complaining, “He’s already answered that question 15 times.” Citing more “fake news,” he ended the briefing.

What is it with Trump and hydroxychloroquine? Since he refuses to divulge his tax returns or details about businesses he refused to divest as president, it begs the question: Do the Trumps have a financial interest in this unproven-for-COVID drug?

Steve Parks is a retired New York journalist now living in Easton.