Following up on Victoria Hugo-Vidal’s column in the Maine Sunday Telegram (Nov. 29), I’d like to say more about COVID-19 deniers.

Everyone on this planet should read “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed” by Jared Diamond. He studied many societies that collapsed throughout history.

He identifies five common denominators in all those downfalls: human impact on the environment; climate change;
friendly neighbors; hostile neighbors, and dysfunctional political and cultural practices. It is how each society reacted to those factors that led to their downfalls.

Let’s focus on the word “choose” in the title of the book. Denying climate change is a choice. Denying COVID-19 is a choice. So, all of you out there who believe what Donald Trump says about the virus and who don’t have a problem with how he handled it, you are making a choice. You are choosing to ignore a global pandemic. You are choosing to walk away from solutions. You will be the ones who won’t survive a collapse, because you are choosing to ignore the problems.

U.S. Centers for Disease Control director Robert Redfield said in July that if we all wore masks, COVID could be under control in six weeks in the U.S. Would that be so hard to do? We’ve now endured nine months of dealing with this virus. If we’d done the right thing all those months ago, I wouldn’t be writing this letter, and we’d all be better for it, and all those people would not have been taken by or affected by COVID-19.

Doris Luther
Hollis

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