Nation relieved
Once upon a time in the United States, the National Security Council had a directorate for global health security and bio-defense, but this office was eliminated by President Trump. The office was tasked with predicting, planning and preparing for the possibility of a pandemic, but how could we have possibly predicted or prepared for the possibility that predicting or preparing for anything might be prudent?
You see, predicting, projecting, prophesizing and prognosticating are not the American way. In fact, we’re neither proactive nor reactive — we simply do. We’re a nation of doers. But we’re also a nation of do-nothingers, which means we’re not going to lift a finger — unless that finger is our trigger finger, in which case we stand our ground, shoot first and ask questions later. And that is precisely why Americans should be prouder than ever that we spend so much money on the military. Because it is in times like the present, as we face the global threat of the coronavirus pandemic, our boasting monstrous military might will finally come good.
Who needs extra plastic gloves for keeping the virus off our hands when we can just snipe it from over a mile away? Why are we trying to show the virus hospitality by getting more hospital beds? And who needs hand sanitizer when we can just burn the coronavirus with Napalm? Why are we setting up temporary hospitals when we should be employing shoot-and-scoot tactics? Why do we need so many silly face-masks and ventilators when we have tens of thousands of high-tech, military-grade, tactical, full-face respirators with attached night-vision goggles? By using those, the doctors and nurses on the front lines of this war could work into the night! Come to think of it, we don’t even need to be paying all these doctors and nurses who are on the ground, in the trenches, when we could simply carry out an aerial assault on the coronavirus with fighter jets and drones.
Our military will give us the cutting edge, ruthless tactics against the coronavirus that all these soft “first, do no harm” people simply cannot provide. Yeah, that silly Hippocratic Oath doesn’t really do much good when the primary objective is to kill the coronavirus, does it? So, unlike those hypocritical Hippocrats running our hospitals, trained soldiers will not hesitate to do as much harm to the coronavirus as possible.
We will strike first against this evil and cunning virus. After setting up a blockade and beginning an artillery barrage, infantry will advance swiftly from our garrison in a frontal assault, a forward charge, ready to ambush, outflank, envelope and encircle the virus in a coup de main that will in all hope be a coup de grâce! We will resort to guerilla tactics if we have to! We will give no quarter! We will never retreat or surrender! We will not negotiate with the virus like those pacifist medical and public health professionals think we should!
With aggressive tactics like these, I predict that this battle plan we’ve prepared to defeat the coronavirus once and for all will work like a charm. In the meantime, we will never stop swarming, shelling and laying siege to this pandemic — no matter what the doctors tell us. Believe me, our fresh approach to public health war, or as I prefer to think of it, Blitzgesundheit, is just what the doctor ordered.
Written by: Benjamin Porter— bbporter@ucdavis.edu
(This article is humor and/or satire, and its content is purely fictional. The story and the names of “sources” are fictionalized.)
