One of the hardest things about being murdered is wrapping your head around the concept that someone is trying to kill you.

For example, let’s say your boyfriend, whom you love, currently has his hands around your throat. He squeezes, tighter and tighter. You’re in the kitchen, you could stab him with a knife but . . . that would be lethal force!

Is he really trying to murder you?

Like, murder-murder?

Or is he just . . . murdering you ever so slightly? Maybe you shouldn’t fight back yet? Maybe you’ll stab him to death and the cops will say accusingly, “You killed a man because you couldn’t tell when he was just kidding?”

Right now, in America, facing this virus with no help from our federal government . . . we’re all that woman, in the kitchen, trying to figure out if it’s “just sorta murder” or if it’s really “murder-murder.”

Spoiler: It’s murder-murder.

Everything right now is just inchoate agony and questions. Why did our administration refuse tests from WHO? Why did they discourage testing for so long? Why didn’t they do sampling months ago? Contact tracing? Why did they allow flights from epidemic countries without quarantine? Where are our masks? Why did they tell us not to wear them? Where is our medical stockpile? Where are our respirators? Why was our pandemic response team disbanded? Where is FEMA? Where are our field hospitals? Where is the Army Corps of Engineers? Where is the National Guard?

For those of us still lost in the fog of war, thinking, “Well, we shouldn’t worry that it’s malicious, because Trump is perfectly capable of killing us through sheer incompetence” . . . well yes, that may be true, but it’s not what’s happening.

Let me remind you who this man is. Here’s something Trump has actually said, using his outside voice, on the record:

“You know what solves it?” Trump said of America’s alleged troubles during a 2014 interview. “When the economy crashes, when the country goes to total hell and everything is a disaster. Then you’ll have a [chuckles], you know, you’ll have riots to go back to where we used to be when we were great.”

And, lest we forget, here’s what his comrade-in-arms Steve Bannon said,

Lenin wanted to destroy the state and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down and destroy all of today’s establishment.”

Trump is a serial rapist. He is a pedophile. He is a mafioso. He is a criminal. He put a hit out on his own ambassador to Ukraine. He is a Russian Asset. And he is currently, this very morning, committing genocide by putting people in concentration camps. It’s not neglect, it’s murder.

He is trying to murder us.

We need to work together, respond quickly and decisively, the way you would respond with a surgical team to cut out a Stage 4 Cancer. We need to put enormous amounts of pressure on our state and local government officials to mobilize. We need to put enormous amounts of pressure on Congress. And in the meantime, until we can get the resources of the government mobilized, we need to become our own rescue team. Share supplies, share information, share resources, evade the social media blackouts, help our fellow citizens.

Let’s get to work.

Any wisdom I have about this comes from reading and listening to Sarah Kendzior and Andrea Chalupa. You can listen to their terrifying podcast at Gaslit Nation.