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America has always been torn at its seam by ideological, cultural and racial divisions.

In the 1770s, as the “spirit of ‘76” percolated, there were roughly 2.5 million colonists in America. They were bitterly divided over loyalty to the Crown and loyalty to the “spirit of ’76.”

Even after the Revolutionary War broke out, the nation remained divided—those willing to fight and those unwilling to fight.

By 1778, the Centennial Army was losing the war, and would have lost the war had it not been for a 5,000 man battalion of freed African-American slaves who came to the rescue and proved to be the “best” fighters in the war. The Founding Fathers may have drafted the Bill of Rights but it was the Fighting Brothers who saved the “spirit of ’76.”

It was racial divisions that led to the bloodiest conflict in American history: the Civil War which claimed at least 600,000 lives.

It was the land-stealing expansion westward after the Civil War that created forever divisions among the “white man” and Native-Americans.

It was racial divisions that led to the creation of the Ku Klux Klan, midnight lynchings, and Jim Crow laws.

It was the greed of the Robber Barons that created the forever divisions between “labor and business” in this country—unbridled business capitalism versus decent wage-earning populism.

Americans were bitterly divided over whether to enter World Wars I & II—with many prominent American business and industrial leaders supporting Adolf Hitler.

Americans were embroiled in bloody divisions over the civil rights movement—a movement that simply wanted to extend basic human rights to a segregated people; a movement that was met with beatings, lynchings, murders, and church bombings.

The Vietnam War divided the young and old throughout America—with the old expecting the young to fight and die for their political ideology.

And today America is once again divided: does the individual right to not wear a mask exceed the need of group to have public safety; should America reopen the economy or stay at home; should Americans be forced to work in dangerous, unhealthy, and Covid infected meat-producing plants to keep the “food chain” going?

All these questions have bitterly divided Americans during its worst-ever social crisis. People in the streets are protesting with AR-15s and Confederate flags; governors are threatening people who refuse to work in death dens; and literally thousands of elderly nursing home patients and inmates are dying in relative obscurity and indifference from the nation’s political leaders

More than 60,000 have died in less than two months from the Covid pandemic; and upwards of a 100,000 more will die before year’s end—more deaths from the pandemic than any other nation in the world, and Americans are now being told that this is “a great success story.”

As the “spirit of ‘76” was sown with divisions so will the “response of 2020” be sown with divisions.

And in the midst of all the pressures born of the social, political and most certainly medical divisions now ravaging America, Manhattan emergency room doctor Lorna Breen took her own life. She had enough. She could no longer bear the weight of these pressures. She walked away from life because she had no more life left to give.

And all Americans should be ashamed.

In varying degrees, in one way or another, we are all responsible for Dr. Breen’s death—it was our ideological, political and racial divisions that created the nation’s shameful government response to the Covid pandemic.

So, here we are, folks: there are now calls that old people should march to the front lines of the Great Covid War and die so the young can go to beauty salons and the ball parks.

That is the new measure of “success” in this country today.