One-day miracle? No, it will require work to recover

Donald Trump speaking about the coronavirus pandemic on Feb. 27, 2020.

“One day, it's like a miracle, it will disappear.”

We all know now how wrong that was. It was not going to be easy. And even with solutions in sight, keeping this from rearing its ugly head again will require us to always be on guard.

The truth is, this was going to take some work to defeat. While we held out for the ultimate panacea, we needed to filter ourselves from the harm, to deflect it from ourselves and to keep from spreading it to others. We failed miserably: People, apparently not understanding the tremendous harm they were doing, failed to protect themselves and it spread. It’s as if they knew it was malignant, didn’t care and put themselves and their loved ones in harm’s way.

And after many months of suffering, finally the solution we waited and hoped for arrived.

But it turned out the solution was only the first step taking many more months to fully implement before we could get past the worst of this scourge.

Even if we can eliminate this on a large scale, it may remain with us for a long time in low-level forms, perhaps mutating in unexpected ways and without continued vigilance, become a major problem again. It may be that we can’t truly eradicate this. Now that it has been unleashed, it may always be with us in some form. The trick is to keep it at a low level.

So, yes, the vote which removes Donald Trump from the office of the presidency, has been a seeming panacea, a shot in the arm, as it were, against the advancement of his deceitful dictatorial efforts that have damaged, if not destroyed, our economy, our public health and our public discourse. But some will not allow themselves to accept the vote, just as some will not allow themselves to accept a vaccine against a deadly virus. They may be at best, stubborn, or at worst, misinformed. But the danger is, those people will persist in the pestilence. We’ve already seen how bad that problem is with his supporters staging their deadly, seditious riot at the Capitol, hoping to intimidate Congress into overturning his unambiguous defeat at the polls.

Clearly, there is a lot of work to do. The vote, like the vaccine against COVID-19, is just the first step. The vaccine keeps the crown spikes of the coronavirus from latching neatly into the cells of our lungs, infecting and suffocating us. The vote will keep Trump from his monarchical desire to keep his crown spikes from latching neatly into the cells of our democracy, infecting and suffocating it. It will, it is hoped, remove Trump’s authority and moreover, remove his interminable appearances in our daily lives. A sign of progress on this front came when the social media platform Twitter finally banned him, keeping him from fooling the gullible with his destructive delusions and unwarranted narcissism.

But until the vote of his defeat is accepted widely, even by doubters, his infectious war on reason continues to present a risk. That’s why, until it is safe again, we must continue to faithfully filter out and deflect the baseless lies, the shameless spin and the unfounded conspiracies. We’ve taken the first steps and we can hope there is light at the end of the tunnel.

It would be great to think that the vote in November was the thing we were waiting for, the one day, like a miracle, when it just disappeared.

But this will likely be more of a struggle to overcome than even COVID-19.