By Kristin Urquiza
‘If you don’t have an underlying health condition, it’s safe out there,” Gov. Doug Ducey told Arizonans in late May, hoping to stimulate the economy. Those words were also a death sentence for Dad, a healthy and exuberant 65-year-young man named Mark Anthony Urquiza. He, like so many others, would not have died if American leaders — President Trump and governors like Ducey — hadn’t been so cavalier about pushing consumers to spend money. They have blood on their hands. When a shelter-in-place order took effect in March, both my parents believed in mask-wearing and social distancing. We watched in horror as New York brought in refrigerated trucks and dug mass graves. But by the time Arizona started to reopen on May 15, I couldn’t compete with the message coming out of the White House, projected across cable news and reinforced by Ducey. Dad was a Republican. He watched Fox News, and he had voted for Ducey and Trump. When they told him not to live in fear, that very few people would catch the disease, that its effects weren’t serious, he believed them. “The governor said it was safe,” Dad told me as, for the first time in months, he prepared to go out and meet up with his friends at their favorite karaoke bar. “Why would he say that if it wasn’t?”
A few weeks later, as he was fighting to breathe and terrified that he might die, he told me he felt betrayed. It was one of our final conversations. The next day, he was put on a ventilator. He died five days later, without family, as an ICU nurse held his hand. My father didn’t deserve that ending, and neither did the 152,000 people and counting, that we’ve lost. We got to this crisis because our leaders decided not to lead. The pandemic has surged across the country because politicians refused to acknowledge the severity of the disease, to increase testing and contact tracing, to give people desperately needed economic relief so they could stay home. Even as the case counts skyrocket, their response has been no response at all: They forge ahead with reopening businesses, public spaces and schools as if nothing is happening. As if people aren’t dying unnecessary, difficult, lonely deaths. At every stage of this slow-motion catastrophe — downplaying the virus, disregarding the advice of scientists, encouraging people to “liberate” themselves from health restrictions, pushing states to reopen too fast, without a plan — the Trump administration and its allies have made one thing abundantly clear: People like my dad are expendable, no matter how they vote. I refuse to let our government officials wash their hands of our suffering.
