{"id":1727,"date":"2020-12-10T08:55:12","date_gmt":"2020-12-10T08:55:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.radiofree.org\/?p=136769"},"modified":"2020-12-10T08:55:12","modified_gmt":"2020-12-10T08:55:12","slug":"2020-unmasked-the-truth-about-all-lives-matter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2020\/12\/10\/2020-unmasked-the-truth-about-all-lives-matter\/","title":{"rendered":"2020 unmasked the truth about \u2018all lives matter\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"
As much as this year has been about Black Lives Matter, it is also about something else: This is the year when we really learned that not even white lives matter to most white people.<\/p>\n
Little else can explain white people allowing 139,000 of themselves to die<\/a> from COVID-19 as of late November. That represents 56 percent of all of the Americans who had perished, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC. That is enough bodies to fill seven Madison Square Gardens; and the percentage is close to population parity, as 60 percent of Americans are white.<\/p>\n After the pandemic began with a grossly disproportionate death toll among people of color, the percentage of white dead is growing, most searingly in the Midwest. According to CDC data<\/a>, white people in that region went from accounting for about 35 percent of deaths among people under 65 in June to 50 percent in August. They have gone from about 70 percent of senior deaths back in June to more than 80 percent in August.<\/p>\n Yet not even the spread of COVID-19 into previously spared white communities has been enough to galvanize unified action against the pandemic.<\/p>\n It was not enough on November 3, when a majority of white people voted for the incumbent president whose policies are literally killing them. Exit polls<\/a> say 61 percent of white men and 55 percent of white women tried to reelect<\/a> Donald Trump, the same leader who purposely denied<\/a> his own voters, along with the rest of the nation, his advance knowledge of how deadly the novel coronavirus could be. They voted for a commander-in-chief who, 10 months into the pandemic, has seen to it that the wealthiest country on Earth still has no national strategy to combat the plague. Despite what may be the most lethal form of presidential incompetence in American history, Trump beat President-elect Joe Biden among white voters by 17 percentage points.<\/p>\n The same group voted to take essentially no action on the mounting toll stemming from climate change. From 2017 to 2019, nearly 1,200 Americans were killed annually<\/a> in climate and weather disasters totaling $154 billion a year, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The average number of deaths is quadruple that of the 1980s, and the costs of damage represent a roughly-nine-fold increase. And according to dramatic new data<\/a> in The Lancet medical journal, heat-related mortality for Americans over 65 has nearly doubled in the last two decades, taking a record 19,000 lives in 2018.<\/p>\n