A lot of us are looking back as this is the week COVID hit. Yeah, the virus was in the US back in January of 2020, but March was when things started shutting down. It was when people started to work from home. It was when toilet paper and hand sanitizer vanished. It was when our government officials lied to us about masks because they didn’t trust us – and then got upset because we no longer trusted them.

I’m disturbed how quickly both sides turned a pandemic into a political football. Trump was the biggest factor in that. It was either everything he said was brilliant and the other side was trying to kill people by denying it, or he was deliberately doing the wrong things to kill people. The noise made it so hard to get reliable information. Even those “independent” voices found themselves swayed one way or another by the Trump tidal wave.

Just as with 9/11 twenty years ago, COVID’s impact has changed the world. I’m seeing this and there are scary parallels to the decades before the fall of the Roman Republic, as well as the time before the French Revolution.

I really hope I’m wrong.