“You know, there’s something about this that’s like, well it’s like you’re expecting a letter that you’re just crazy to get, and you’re hanging around the front door for fear you might not hear him ring. You never realize that he always rings twice…” – Frank Chambers – The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946)

A comment, yesterday, on social media:

Everyone here has been paying attention for a long time. We all knew. That is cold comfort.

American exceptionalism coupled with astroturf (fake) populism has always been part of the equation in this country.

Unfortunately we’ve had grotesque and catastrophic failures in the institutions that have sometimes helped restrain these collective baser instincts as a nation. The individual moral, ethical, and human failures that got us to where we are have long since become too numerous to catalog.

We all have to understand that somewhere over four in ten people you pass on the street fervently believe he’s doing a great job. Couple that with the realization that approximately one third of this country would happily do away with another third, while the remaining would watch and do nothing – and you have a recipe for disaster.

We are so perilously close to this, if not there already.

I’ll illustrate. The conventional wisdom is now parroting the line that widespread testing is not feasible and that the economy is being severely damaged. Think about that for a minute. Translation: We don’t want to pay for it. The 1% don’t want to endanger their profit margins, nor do they want to give up over forty years of undeserved tax windfalls that they’ve been reaping from our economy and infrastructure. Socialize the risk, privatize the profits. It was the greatest parasitic grift balancing act in the history of civilization.

Mother nature doesn’t believe in trickle down economics. There’s always payback – and here we are.

The horror and the scope of the current human toll is nothing to these people. It hasn’t been a concern of theirs in the past. Why should they change? And they have a sufficient number of useful idiot teabagger acolytes to help them continue to achieve their ends.

There’s an “Operation Moron” protest scheduled for Jefferson City, Missouri sometime early this [….] week. I usually try to cover these kinds of events as a photographer. Not this time. I don’t want to be any part of a practical demonstration of Darwin.

The postman always rings twice.