Vice President Pence, while you’re in Florida, hear our stories of pain, loss | Editorial

How quickly President Trump forgets.

“The Federal government is not supposed to be out there buying vast amounts of items and then shipping. You know, we’re not a shipping clerk,” said POTUS not too long ago, and more than once.

But this week, Vice President Mike Pence himself is pulling duty as Federal Shipping Clerk-in-Chief. On Wednesday, he’ll be firing up Air Force 2 and heading to Orlando with a cargo-hold full of personal protection equipment that he will personally deliver to an Orlando nursing home. Afterward, he’ll be doing the roundtable thing with Florida’s hotshots of hospitality and titans of tourism.

In all sincerity, Mr. Vice President, we are glad you’re coming. We are in no position to take anything for granted. We are grateful for every single mask and gown we can get to the low-wage workers in the long-term-care facilities where our parents, grandparents and disabled children reside. These places, as Gov. DeSantis correctly notes, are breeding grounds for the state’s reported coronavirus cases. That number is over 45,000, or roughly the size of Gadsden County’s population, where an infant, and two children, ages 5 and 9, have just been diagnosed.

The media can, and do, supply America’s comedians with a steady stream of #FloridaMan material. But the vast majority of our state’s women and men are honorable, hardworking people living purpose-driven lives. Many, like you, are people of religious faith. All of them are people of faith in something they love more than their own lives.

Usually, that’s family and friends, and Floridians have lost nearly 2,000 of them to coronavirus, in many cases without being able to comfort them as they drew their last breaths under quarantine.

Coronavirus does not discriminate on the basis of race, sex, national origin, religion, political affiliation or size of one’s bank account. Even the Happiest and Most Magical Places on Earth are suffering. Faced with losses of a billion dollars a month, Disney has just bolstered its balance sheet by taking on $11 billion in new debt, at interest rates ranging from 1.75 percent to 3.8 percent. If this “unseen enemy” is not brought under control, that won’t be enough, even for Disney, to stave off the Big Bad Wolf at our planet’s door, but it will keep stockholders going longer than the low-wage workers who make Florida’s healthcare and hospitality empires possible.

For most of Florida’s “essential heroes,” options for bolstering their budgets are limited to maxing out 22 percent credit cards and waiting in line at the local food bank.

Mr. Vice President, Florida has now overtaken that blue state out west in the number of coronavirus-related unemployment claims, notwithstanding the unparalleled creakiness of our processing system, which our governor correctly calls a “jalopy,” and possibly a $77 million crime against Florida taxpayers.

Mr. Vice President, nobody can fully comprehend the suffering of millions, but anybody with patience to listen can understand the suffering of one recently, unexpectedly unemployed Miami woman named Janice Bernstein.

Please include her story, as told to the Miami Herald’s Linda Robertson, in your airplane reading material, and while you’re here, please spend some time with a few of the many Floridians who are with her in that same, sinking boat.

Floridians are grieving, Mr. Vice President. People here are hungry. People here are sick.

Please don’t look away.