America is afflicted by a terrible disease. It's both physical and mental. It's not just the pandemic, though the failure to deal with COVID is one of its symptoms. The disease is laying waste and sickening the very country we call home. At the roots of the disease is ignorance, not knowing and understanding the facts. It permeates our political and social lives and afflicts people in all walks of life. Its worst symptoms result in some of our citizens losing touch with reality and believing all sorts of nonsense to be the truth and truth to be lies. The wilder the conspiracies, the more the disease take a hold of them. It's a sort of undiagnosed madness. Whole groups become afflicted and reinforce each other in this illness. Once it has taken hold, little seems to change them. The disease breaks families and friends apart. It undermines the democratic processes at the root of our society. Slowly it is rotting the foundations of everything we have held dear and learned from the past. If the disease continues to spread, the whole body politic may well sicken and die and we will be left with some sort a fascist or communist dictatorship where democracy will be just a dream.