If you’re curious to know what it would be like for the state government to “open up” our country, as our Supreme Leader and protestors around the country are now demanding, you don’t have to wonder about what it would be like.

For the people in the 20 or 25 hot spots, where thousands are falling ill and dying, their communities have been open all along. They were never closed. We needed them too much.

These are mostly African-American, Latino, sick, and elderly. Thousands of them have died.

The people who are police officers, nurses, paramedics, grocery cashiers, delivery men and women,  the people who clean the hospital floors,  harvest the farms, work in meatpacking compounds, drive busses, collect the garbage,  service our cars, prepare the takeout in restaurants and make living possible for the rest of us.

We are sitting home and working on our computers sending nasty messages to each other and fretting over the news, complaining about our restlessness and inaction.

The people in those cities can tell you what it’s like if you want to know.  They have never sheltered in place or been asked to maintain social distance. They can’t work at home.

I don’t like to think about it too often, but this is the way our country works: the poor people take care of the rich people, and my first boss taught me about the world’s oldest story: the rich always screw the poor.

The needy and vulnerable are catching it on the chin now, not the wealthy and entitled. They are the front lines, cleaning our floors, cooking our food,  stacking the supermarket shelves, cleaning up the messes in our hospitals, doing the grinding work of caring for the sick and disabled, tending to their wounds, and to their toilet functions, and to the extreme elderly in nursing homes.

They are the ones who are paying the highest price for us and risking – sometimes sacrificing their lives –  so that we can live and eat and have clean hospital clothes. They are not the ones getting those stimulus checks.

Ask them what’s it’s like to be opened up to the coronavirus.

The poor Cuban refugees in Miami know what it’s like,  too, there are not yet any tests for them, the rich billionaires on an island enclave offshore just paid for their coronavirus health care center, they can get tested every day, they feel quite safe and healthy.

We are only recently coming to consciousness with the astounding ability of this virus to seek out the needy and the vulnerable, so often a member of a minority in our country, so often a refugee or immigrant.

The President has made it clear that he doesn’t care about these people.

I need to figure out how much I care about them.

There is a message here; I’m just beginning to understand it. We have abandoned these people in the most arrogant and selfish ways while we fuss about our safety. The people responsible for them either didn’t notice what was happening to them, lied about it consciously, or just doesn’t care.

They never got the tests, masks or gloves.

That is an immoral happening for the ages, especially when men in their pick-up trucks drive around statehouses whining that their constitutional rights are being threatened.

Staying open for poor and working people is proving to be a catastrophe; two-third of all of the coronavirus cases in the United States have been African-American or Latino. So have the vast majority of deaths.

Many of these people, we are learning, chose to die at home rather than risk hospital bills or the virus itself. Many tried to get tested and couldn’t. (At least 30 grocery store workers have died from the coronavirus.)

I think that’s what wishful thinking about “normal” is like in our country just now; I am happy to wait a few weeks more.

I want to pause here and say I am not writing this out of a conspiratorial plot to destroy President Trump; I am not a secret agent of the Democratic Party, I am not a Trump hater, I am not a Trump lover. My wish for him is to help us deal with this awful thing in an honest, compassionate, and helpful way. 

He is failing, bad for him, bad for us. There are no winners in a catastrophe like this. Our only chance is to come together; his single idea is to pull us apart.

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A friend of mine wanted to talk the other night about whether or not my state should begin opening up our schools and businesses before our communities and economy, and well-being, i are damaged any farther.

This argument is raging all over the country.

I said I didn’t know the answer; this is the common dilemma of being caught between a rock and a hard place. I need to figure out how I feel about it.

There is no one or simple answer.

Since we don’t have a leader to guide us when it comes to moral choices and sacrifice without a political agenda, I think I will have to try to do it on my own. Here goes.

I’ve thought from the first that the coronavirus is a moral virus because it demands that we make moral decisions about ourselves and the welfare of others. Nowhere is that clearer or more complicated than the suddenly partisan and political question of when to open up our lives and economy and when not to.

For me, it is the most painful and troubling of the many decisions this Pandemic has asked me and everyone else to make. The kids are out of school too long, that will harm them. Many of their parents are out of work and without an income for too long, that will hurt all of us. Millions of business could shut down if this goes on much longer.

And yes, that will kill people in a different way.

It’s a tough enough issue on its own, made much more difficult by the President’s decision to make it a political, highly partisan issue.

The President, as always, enthusiastically embraces his role as Disrupter and Divider; this is, after all, why he was elected.  He can’t reach out to pull the country together, because that is not what he does. He has never shied away from his stated wish to take a wrecking ball to government as we know it.

We are all paying the consequences.

I do believe The President is handling this crisis as energetically and as he can, and in as self-serving a way as is possible.  I am sorry he hasn’t taken advantage of the Pandemic to become a genuine leader for all.

He could have done, as the British would say. But he’s too angry, something inside of this man is broken.

He took another path. I’m sad about that. It is his job to think of me, too, not just the people who voted for him.

I am sorry he has urged his followers  – notably his gun-worshipping  Troll Army in their MAGA caps – to rebel against his government and the governors who want to proceed cautiously or not yet at all about opening up people’s lives for business and life.

To me, asking people to rebel against the government – his government –  is a kind of unconscious treason.

It is the very opposite of what he should be doing.

I believe he won’t get away with it. The Pandemic is a lie-buster, his act is starting to smell, and he can’t get off the stage, even when the camera has turned on his orange skin, angry eyes, and whatever is resting on top of his head.

It’s just not working any longer.

There is the hubris the Greeks were talking about.  He can’t be wrong, he can’t step out of himself for a moment. I turned to him for healing, and it feels like some animal has just peed on my leg.

In the movie, the audience is looking at one another comfortably, wondering to get out of the theater without attracting too much attention. There is something ghoulish but hypnotic about watching someone in so much pain.

Mr. Trump insists on framing horror as a Democrat versus Republican issue while he insists he isn’t responsible for any of it.  While thousands of people die, he has nothing to say to them. He puts up videos affirming his greatness. No wonder he loves Kim Jong-un.

His followers across the country are aggrieved and angry – often with much justification – about the brutal interruption of their lives. Republican and Democratic governors are fighting, mostly side by side, to save as many lives as they can.

We all have a choice to make: who to follow, who to believe.

I’m not so cynical as to attribute all of that chaos to political ambitions and hidden motives.

It’s a false argument, these assaults on the governors, who are living close to the fire.

I don’t know of a soul in office or out who isn’t almost desperate to try to return to normal.

They would just like some reassurance that they won’t be sending grandmothers and mothers off to die, sacrificing the needy and the poor, and endangering the lives and safety of our children.

It doesn’t seem to me to be too much to ask, given what we have been through, to move thoughtfully and carefully about opening the country up. Do we need to be swimming in blood to learn who to listen to?

Perhaps the Gods have decided to wake us up from our selfish and hurtful slumber.

As an older person at risk, I hate being confined to my house, but I understand the reasons for it.  I will take a lot of responsibility for ensuring my safety if it means the rest of my community and our country can come to life.

I can avoid crowds, wear my mask, sanitize my hands, wash in soap, stay at home.

I can’t imagine getting in my truck and shouting at the people working so hard to keep us alive. I can’t imagine throwing the neediest and vulnerable among us to the wolves in this way. Good Christians and lovers of Jesus, are you out there, are you listening? He just might come back one day.

This is a much bigger issue than Democrat versus Republican; it goes to life, freedom, personal responsibility, and perspective. There are compelling arguments on both sides. If ever an issue needed sunlight and reasoned debate, it is this one.

It also goes to the most profound issue of all, the elephant in the room: the growing willingness to sacrifice the mostly poor and the elderly to the virus if it means saving our economy and the individual well-being of millions of people.

We really can’t live too much longer like this, or those Dystopian movies will become prophecies.

People do die, especially older people, the issue is how many and whether their deaths are necessary, or their lives should be cut short at the whim of governors. Playing God is beyond conventional politics.

How, after all, are we supposed to survive and live if we can’t work or move about freely in our communities. Have the stakes ever been higher? How much harm are we causing our children by keeping them out of school for so long?

Keeping the country closed is a disaster, and many people are rightfully wondering what the point of living in a closed-down society if there is no life or economy or functioning country to live in when the doors open up?

If we don’t get back to some semblance of normalcy soon, there will be no normal to return to, as Governor Cuomo and almost all of the governors have suggested.

Caught in the middle, or perhaps out farther than that is what I call the Cuomo Movement, the data-driven, science-based, moral,  and almost Puriticanal determination to careful,  to do what the doctors and health care professionals are begging us to do, and open up, but slowly and with great care.

There is something doctrinaire about Andrew Cuomo; there is something very human. He asks us to be patient.

We’ve come this far, can we not go a little farther now?

“Blame me,” pleads Andrew Cuomo to the angry and the impatient, a shocking, and perhaps calculating effort to show us what it means to take responsibility if you have taken vows to do so.

I am genuinely sorry that the President has chosen another pointlessly divisive path. We shouldn’t have to fight one another right now; the idea is to pull us together. Together, it is true; I think we can do anything.

It seems like such a fake and contrived struggle for me. Who, exactly, in either party anywhere, advocating that we don’t open up?

So I guess – I have to land somewhere – that I am closer to the Cuomoists than the Trumpists. I can’t see the rationale for risking a return of the virus, or the needless killing of people (even older people) if we don’t have to do it if a month or so more would wound or shrink this monster of a virus.

Sometime next year, there will be a vaccine. That’s when it will end for me.

Of all the principal players, Andrew Cuomo seems to have the most evident sense of morality and the moral obligation of leaders to lead, not follow or pander.

I’m not interested in Trump-hating, but managing a crisis like this is not his finest hour or even a reasonably good one. He seems overwhelmed, frantic, and flailing, lashing out and lying almost compulsively and without shame.

I stick to my guns. He is falling apart, overwhelmed, and frightened. He didn’t reckon on this, for all of his finger-pointing, shaming and blaming. He can’t handle it.

Cuomo, the anti-Trump says yes, let’s open up. I agree. But it won’t be next week or even next month. Every day, he brings us homey stories about his daughters, his brother Chris, his mother, Matilda.

Sometimes, I have to pinch myself and remember I’m not watching Days Of Our Lives. His brother thanks to him for being such a great role model; his daughters bring their boyfriends home and scold him for not doing more. He tears up for the sick and the dying.

Still, he gathers the facts, presents them honestly, admits to what he can’t do, shares what he can do.

There is no doubt there are humanity and compassion in that often complicated man; he gives me guidance, inspiration, reality, and support, all at the same time. Great leaders rise to the occasion, as Rudy Guiliani did during 911.

He is showing us what a leader is, what we have missed, what we could gain.

His emergence on the shoulders of this crisis is a big deal; it will help re-shape our national politics. Everything happens for a reason; Cuomo is the Angel Of Reality, the messenger of truth and hope. It can be done.

This is not a baby crisis; it doesn’t fit neatly into the American appetite for complete freedom and instant results. We are an impatient people, spoiled and impulsive.

The scientists and doctors are terrified and flummoxed about this virus; they don’t know what it will do.

Every country that opened up too soon is closing up again, with more sickness, more deaths, more commercial interruption. Italy and Spain hover like the ghosts of Christmas past. This is what might have been. It doesn’t have to be. 

Andrew Cuomo has worked hard for my trust and earned it.

I did give the President a chance. He blew it.

Donald Trump has once again reminded me that he doesn’t care about me or people like me.

He is doing to me what his followers had done to them. There is perhaps some justice in that, but it has made my experience with this virus more confusing and frightening and difficult than it needs to be.

If you can rationalize that away as a plot, bless you, you once were blind and still are.

There is a new moral dimension to this crisis as we learn that it is killing poor, African-Americans, Latinos, and the elderly disproportionately. The virus is a bigot, on top of everything else, an anti-Christ.

Governor Cuomo and several other governors have grasped this as a  moral issue and confronted it. Our President is running from it for dear life. As I see it, those are facts, not opinions.

So that’s where I have landed on this profound, defining, and central issue. Open up by all means, and as soon as possible. Listen to the wise men and women and do what they say.

And yes, it is time to protect the needy and the vulnerable.

Countries are only as good as their moral center.

If we walk away from these people again and fail to learn their lessons, we will all be stained forever by their suffering and blood, and perhaps our own.