DEAR EDITOR:

Another customer of my favorite restaurant and I sighed at the creepy look of the darkened place (at a responsible distance from one another) as we awaited our curbside pick-up orders. “This too shall pass,” he said.

Three days later, the White House announced it would make the quarantine period end sooner rather than later in keeping with a handy slogan picked up from an alleged news source that “the cure cannot be allowed to be worse than the disease.”

President Trump made this his own mantra during one of his press meetings. He ignored highly qualified medical advice. He ignored the fact that self-quarantine, safe social distancing, washing our hands frequently and avoiding large gatherings are our only defensive measures at the moment. He ignored that consequences for abandoning these measures will be more dead citizens, and he opted to work instead for the financial markets. He ignored that downturns in the stock market always, always turn around, while dead is a one-and-done event.

This same president gutted the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the White House epidemic response team and is currently suing to eliminate the last vestiges of health insurance coverage for 30 million Americans — all to save money. Now he wants to give unspecified and unregulated use of $500 billion of your tax dollars to a creature of Wall Street, who serves at his discretion, to restore market losses. All the while he balks at any oversight or regulation of his lackey, which could ensure those funds are used to help people made unemployed by the quarantine and the small businesses that employ most of them, to survive. You don’t need genius to see where this is going.

Donald Trump is more self-righteous than his many holier-than-thou supporters. Those same people feel grandparents should be willing to die to restore the economy. Some of them even fatally ingest aquarium cleaners because it contains a chemical like the one their president said could protect them. They forget that love of money is the root of all evil; that evil is sin; that the wages of sin are death.

Don’t listen to Trump. Heed the medical folks like Dr. Fauci whose lives and learning are in the service of helping others. I believe Trump lives only to help himself.

JIM CARTWRIGHT