June 2022

To the Editor:

Sir, Madam (or other),

“Never in the history of human affairs has so much damage been inflicted on so many by so few”..with apologies to Winston S. Churchill.                        

*(The Few speech 1940)*

I refer of course to the Battle of Covid -19 now entering its third year with the explosive arrival of the Omicron variant.  

Despite every defensive measure from endless hand washing, hand wringing and hand waving;  through masking, and double masking, to social separation, shut downs, and school closures, to lockdowns, vaccines and endless boosters, the resilient  mutating virus re-emerges,  like Rommel’s Panzers in 1940, behind the Maginot line to render the massive national investment irrelevant. 

Forgive me for correlating the massive social costs of the French Maginot line with the massive social costs of the failure to defeat COVID-19. 

The former turned out to be irrelevant, the later increasingly appears so.      

History repeats itself, so they say, 

There are other similarities, beyond the obvious; namely that the winners of the last war never anticipate the next one.

After WW1, the Victorious geriatric leaders of France,  obsessed with preventing a repeat,  built the impregnable Maginot line along the Franco-German border. 

By 1940 it housed the (then) world's largest Army,  safe from bombardment and frontal assault while a mobile army less than a third its size swept through Belgium and the impassable Ardennes and in six weeks achieved what over four years of mass slaughter had failed to accomplish,  a mere twenty years earlier.

Back home our geriatric leaders,  rich in hindsight and devoid of foresight, double down on their failed directives, all the while studiously avoiding responsibility, the core of leadership, in favor of the allocation of blame, the primary indicator of incompetence.

I rest my case dear Editor,

Print this if you dare,

Sincerely,

Harvey H. Homitz

Sanibel, Florida.

*Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few..  Winston Churchill, August 20th 1940.