It's Time For Cuomo

The governor of my state is advising me to stay inside my home and isolate myself. Just what the heck does he think I've been doing for the past decade?

 

There is today talk among a few opinion-makers out there that perhaps the time has come to replace Joe Biden and think about Andrew Cuomo heading the ticket in 2020. I think it's a good idea.

 

For the last week during the most catastrophic natural disaster in the history of this republic, in what few public appearances he has been able to make, Joe is seemingly becoming more-and-more dazed and confused. The fact of the matter is that his advanced age is showing. I do not believe that he is physically up  to the riggers of the job. Andy Cuomo obviously is. His mobilization of forces in New York State, organizing the teams that will do battle with the coronavirus has been impressive as anything I've witnessed in my lifetime. More than anything, Donald Trump has to be defeated at the polls come election day. The country will barely survive his presidency as it is; four more years will seal our doom. Handing the White House over to an unhinged sociopath - even in the best of times - is never a particularly jolly good idea. This White House is proving disastrous. Something to think about.

In the meantime, Trump's response to this pandemic has been eye-poppingly incompetent and irresponsible. Against the advice of every medical expert, he is now urging Americans to attend Easter services next week. In the weeks leading up to the election of 2016, I wrote a piece on this site predicting that, if elected. Trump would prove to be the worst mass murderer in American history. After about an hour of sober reflection, I deleted the statement, thinking it to be a tad too extreme. Now I wish I hadn't. Four years ago Michael Moore predicted that, if elected, Donald Trump would get a lot of innocent Americans killed. I do believe that the man was possibly onto something. Trump refused to act quickly to bring this virus under control the moment he learned about it. Early in his administration he shut down all of the pandemic response centers that Barack Obama had put into place. A whole lot of innocent Americans will be dying in the weeks and months to come.

Don't listen to Trump. He's an imbecile. Stay inside.

I had a pretty bad case of the flu last week which made me wonder if I had contracted this thing. It seems to have blown over and I'm fine. This can't be emphasized enough, though: stay inside your home and have as little contact as possible with your friends and family. We live in such a time where instant communication with masses of people is as easy as it ever was in human history. In the coming year, the internet will prove as vital - or as harmful - as it's ever been. That will all depend on how we use it.

Stay safe and keep well.

Tom Degan
Goshen, NY

Audrey Degan Gargiulo

Requiem:

Audrey Gargiulo was my father's sister. Although she was the oldest of my grandparents' seven children, she survived them all by a decade or more, living to the age of 100. She was laid to rest yesterday in the family plot at St. Columba's Cemetery in Chester, NY. In normal times she would have had a huge send-off - but these times are hardly normal. There were less than ten people attending her wake and burial. She was the last survivor of all my aunts and uncles on both sides of the family. This truly is the end of an era. This is a melancholy day in too many ways to count.