It ain't just red state Governors who are reopening their states too early -- it's also Democratic Governor Tom Wolf of Pennsylvania, who's planning to loosen physical distancing standards (OK, you know them as "social distancing standards," but I'll keep trying) in the coming weeks, without securing the widespread testing and tracing we need to fully understand the threat we still face. I would hate to think all those stupid right-wing protestors had an outsized say in the conversation yet again! So let Keystone Progress help you push back against stupidity, by helping you tell your Pennsylvania state government to put people before profits and let the science dictate when we start relaxing physical distancing standards. One more thing: we've now had a million confirmed coronavirus cases in America, but we hardly test for it, so we don't know how many we've really had -- unless New York state's finding, that more than one out of every eight of its residents have COVID-19 antibodies, is instructive. I would hate to think we'd have another spike in cases because our leaders don't have the patience we elected them to have.
Meanwhile, a consortium of good government groups (including Progress America, Demand Progress, and Daily Kos) helps you tell your Congressfolk to invest an additional $25 billion in our U.S. Postal Service. I mean, we just pissed away $350 billion in a "small business relief fund" that mostly went to big corporations, and we're pissing away some $150 billion every year in lost revenues thanks to the 2017 tax "reform," so $25 billion ain't that much to ask to keep a good service going, one that helps all Americans. Right-wingers have wanted to privatize our Post Office since time immemorial, and to them every crisis is an opportunity to do evil, but we don't have to put up with that. Nor do we have to put up with our President calling our Post Office "a joke" because it doesn't charge us four times as much! Note well, however, that our President did say there are circumstances under which he'd authorize more funding -- absurd circumstances, to be sure, but I say he just showed us weakness, and it's well past time we attacked when right-wingers are weak.
Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell our EPA to reverse its new, supposedly pandemic-related policy of not enforcing any damn clean air and clean water regulations. Like I said, cynical right-wingers imagine every crisis as an opportunity to do evil, and thus the ones who run our EPA think a pandemic that attacks good Americans' ability to breathe means nothing so much as a time to let big polluting corporations make our air harder to breathe. As a young man, and an aspiring cynic, I suppose I would have found this amusing, but having long rejected cynicism and, hell, having become a man and having put away childish things, I find it all quite disgusting. I wish I could be sure that the worshipers of mammon will find their hell -- or maybe I would simply prefer that they find their hell in this lifetime, so we can all see it, and so future generations can be taught how not to be. In the meantime, I suppose we'll all have to settle for merely doing our duty as best we can.
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