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Chickens Come Home To Roost: COVID Edition
By Lawrence Ross · Updated April 8, 2020
Home · Op-Ed

Chickens Come Home To Roost: COVID Edition

By Lawrence Ross·Updated April 8, 2020
Malcolm X said that when you do dirt to other folks, a boomerang action is going to take a head or two—right here in good old apple-pie-loving America. COVID-19 is Trump's doing.

Did you really think you’d escape these four years unharmed? Did you really believe you were going to be good under Donald Trump’s regime?

Yeah, I know you didn’t vote for this undiagnosed sociopath, as all sane Black folks didn’t. But you do know that some of your Chickens for KFC cousins had no problem pulling the lever for the Racist in Chief—all because they were either too woke or too asleep to understand the ramifications. Or their 401Ks looked good. Or they didn’t vote. Or they listened to something stupid someone told them in the barbershop or beauty salon.

None of that really matters now.

But you, you were different. After he was elected, you just knew that if you posted that Trump was ‘y’all president’ on social media, and that you were for Bernie, Uncle Joe, Kamala, Liz, the Yang Gang, or the dozens of other Democratic alternatives, you’d escape the consequences of having a white supremacist—an incompetent one at that—as the leader of the most powerful nation on earth. But that’s not how it works.

That’s not how any of this works.

Chickens come home to roost, y’all. That’s what Malcolm said more than a half-century ago, and it still resonates today. He said it in a speech in 1963, right after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, when he pointed out that when you do dirty to other folks—like plot coups, execute assassinations and carry out other dirty tricks—that boomerang action is gonna take a head or two right here, in good old apple-pie-loving, red-white-and-blue-flag-waving America.

The same goes for Trump—except we’re the heads being taken.

Call it divine retribution. Call it karma. Call it the blood of Native Americans and enslaved Africans putting a ju-ju on the Land of the Free. Call it whatever you want, but know that we as Americans are now paying for the evil that is Donald Trump. And make no mistake—despite the endless attempts to normalize him, Donald Trump is pure evil. And evil is happening in real time.

This country is now paying for the elevation of Trump to the most powerful office in the world. He’s a man who takes egotistical joy in the pain of others, all because his brain is incapable of empathy and human compassion. Cruelty to him is the point, not the byproduct, of white supremacy. Perfect for the 19th-century slaveholders, and right on time for this century’s capitalists like Trump.

Charlottesville. Build the wall. MAGA. Throw paper towels as Puerto Ricans died by the thousands. Immigrant children in cages. Kaep. Fake caravans. Taking Obamacare from sick Americans. Abandoning the Kurds. The murder of Jamal Khashoggi. The China Virus.

We are paying for the cruelty that only America can afflict on others—not because America is more inherently cruel or more vicious than other nations, but because only America puffs out its chest and declares itself to be “exceptional” in comparison to other cruel nations. It makes the hypocrisy that runs in our DNA starker than that of nations, ones that have the good sense to not declare themselves morally superior.

The Pathological Liar operates in a moral vacuum, surrounded by weak men and women. His only interest is feeding his all-consuming narcissism while maintaining power as by any means necessary. His job is to erode all of the things that we need to have a society where people care for one another. Belief in the media. Belief in institutions. Belief in the truth. This weak “strong man” cares not for you. He doesn’t care for his family. He doesn’t care about America. He cares about himself. He’s a man so racist, so obsessed with the first black president, that Barack Obama lives rent-free in his Trump Tower brain.

Did you see how easy it was for him to say that over 200,000 Americans would die from his incompetence? Did you notice when he said that the “cure can’t be worse than the problem”—and the problem is keeping Americans, human beings, alive? His inhumanity was bound to touch all of us. To make us sick. To make our loved ones die. To make us die.

COVID-19 is a pandemic. It will kill millions worldwide. It will kill hundreds of thousands in the United States. Many of you, living on the fringe of society, will find yourselves economically devastated for years, even decades after this virus disappears into history. Others will suffer an emotional journey into the heart of darkness that will never go away.

Know that a virus wasn’t the cause of your financial or emotional ruin. Know that Trump did this to you. Not because he caused the virus, but because he could never, in a thousand years, relate to the human costs of ineptitude. You never mattered to him.

He walked into this crisis like he did into every room in his life, with the confidence of a mediocre white man…with a fifth-grade education. It didn’t matter if he was hawking Trump Steaks, a fraudulent Trump University or his made-up understanding of biology at the Center for Disease Control—you were doomed. Now, many of you will die.

Die, just like immigrant families died. Just like Heather Heyer died in Charlottesville. Just like the Puerto Ricans died. Just like the Kurds died. Just like Jamal Khashoggi died.

Chickens come home to roost, indeed. 

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