The Roman Empire, thanks to its roads and its well trained armies and civilian organization, lasted over four hundred years before collapsing. The British Empire with its Royal Navy and the knowledge gleaned from the industrial revolution lasted about two hundred. The American Empire buoyed by industrial and military power and democratic ideals has lasted at least one hundred years. As WB Yeats wrote in his famous poem Sailing to Byzantium, civilizations rise to prominence and then fade, they "perne in a gyre." The image of the gyre so beautifully expresses this movement of the ebb and flow. For the United States the pandemic has been like a gut punch. We are badly winded. We have no leadership just a sad man tinkering with the machine like the Great and Powerful Oz desperately turning the dials behind the curtain and shouting into a megaphone. After 75 years of relative peace, "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world." We are sadly in need of a leader and have nothing but a void.