You are the weak underbelly of America - a college story from long ago

When I was in college in the 80s, I shared an apartment with three great guys. All engineers.

One was a well-rounded genuinely nice guy with a Long Island accent, who had the good manners from a “good upbringing”. He was a decent and kind person, and conscientious — I would have trusted him with anything I own and anyone I cared about.

Another one was a well-grounded long-distance runner, an audiophile who first opened my ears to alternative rock and shared his bowl of weed. In a gravelly southern drawl he’d say, “a clean bong is a happy bong”. The REM lyric “he was reared to give respect, somewhere down the line it showed” comes to mind. I would have trusted him with my life. Not sure why I say that now, or how to explain it, but he was elemental, like a rock or the rain, and his unfiltered honesty was complemented by a love of nature and by a homegrown moral compass that consistently valued people over money or convenience.

The third was a clean cut Air Force ROTC who dated my hot former roommate for a while; lean, fit, studious, driven. What would I have trusted him with? Well, the safety and security of the country in the face of a military threat. He was disciplined and clear-thinking.

Mr. ROTC was a senior and graduated eight months later, always busy, so I didn’t get to know him quite as well as the others. But I clearly remember his habitual light-hearted gibe at my music-and-weed loving friend. “Tom, you are the weak underbelly of America.”

And Tom would dryly agree with a gravelly laugh. But Mr. ROTC guy was wrong about that.

Four very different people. In today’s divided country, I suppose I’d be the left winger, Tom maybe a left-leaning independent, my Long Island friend a moderate (centrist liberal or moderate conservative) and Mr. ROTC guy quietly conservative. There was no hate. There was no cult. Politics was not the rapacious weapon between ordinary people that it is today. We got along.

When Mr. ROTC guy graduated, he was replaced by someone different — by #5. An angrier person who entertained fantasies about building an elaborate contraption to squirt something disgusting at drivers who got in his way. He certainly might have turned into a tea party person or a Trump cult member. I hope he didn’t.

Today America has a weak underbelly.
-A president so weak he takes no action to punish Russia for buying the deaths of American soldiers — instead pushing to re-admit Russia to the G8.
-The cowardly GOP politicians allowing trump to get away with selling the country.
-Corrupt cops who kill black people, tear gas protesters, plant evidence, lie about everything, and end up costing society in lives, funds, justice and harmony.
-Most of the TV-addicted public, with many whipped into a stupid frenzy by FOX and many others to a meaningless irrelevance by vapid, grotesque or demeaning programming.
-People too selfish and undisciplined to wear a mask to stop an epidemic, for the good of the country.

In the case of the pandemic, when you look at how Japan “squashed the curve”, compared to the U.S. which is now embarrassed and soon to be isolated, the people who have been duped into believing that not wearing a mask was an important political statement — because they don’t understand science, or they watch FOX News, or they are in the Trump cult — are the weak underbelly. The U.S. is under serious threats that may equal a Great Depression plus the Spanish flu, while being governed by an organized crime family in the seats of power in government. And climate change. To work together to defeat these threats, we needed people to do what was right for the country.