Martinsville, Indiana—David is a doctor. He helps treat cancer patients, who are among the most vulnerable during this COVID-19 outbreak.

That’s why it is so ironic that he should be harassed by a bigot at a local gas station.

Last Friday, Doctor David made a routine stop at the Marathon station on Burton Lane in Martinsville for fuel. Then he walked inside to buy a cup of coffee.

WISH-TV news reports that “when he went inside the clerk immediately started yelling at him, asking if he was Chinese, and told him to leave.”

The report quoted David’s retelling of the incident: “He continued to ask where I’m from and yelling at me. And then I told him that I am from Korean descent but was born in Louisville, Kentucky, and haven’t traveled out of the country in many many years. And he just went off.”

The clerk kept getting angrier and told David to “get out, and never come back.”

Since this report was aired on WISH-TV three days ago, the owner of the Marathon station has publicly apologized for the incident, and the clerk is no longer working at the station.

If this were an isolated incident, it would be bad enough.

Regrettably, anti-Asian sentiment has spread across the country just as quickly as COVID-19.

3/26/2020 CBS News’ website headline: Surging anti-Asian hate crimes being tracked during coronavirus pandemic: “Things are getting very physical”

USA Today reports:  “In recent months, people of Asian descent – not just Chinese Americans – have been shunned, verbally abused, named-called, coughed and spat on, even physically assaulted, said Russell Jeung, chair of the Asian American Studies Department at San Francisco State University who’s been studying bias-related incidents against Asian Americans during the coronavirus epidemic.”

4/2/2020 Washington Examiner headline declares: FBI warns of possible surge in hate crimes against Asian Americans as coronavirus spreads.

Ignorance and fear always bring out the worst in our fallen human nature.

We should be better than this. We should be past this kind of racial division. And I think most Americans are.

But it takes only a small group of  fools to inject paranoia into a volatile situation like this COVID-19 pandemic.

Time-out for a reality check, people: No one from China, or any other Asian country, is more likely to carry COVID-19 than anyone else.

Is that simple fact really too hard for bigots to grasp?

So listen up, haters! If you really want to be upset with someone, then may I direct your ire towards the Communist government of the People’s Republic of China?

The Chinese Communist Party withheld vital information, covered up the extent of the contagion, and refused our early offers of assistance . . . all of which allowed this pandemic to spread across the entire world.

And then they cranked up a propaganda campaign blaming the whole fiasco on us!

Gee, I guess you just can’t trust a Communist anymore. Who knew?

Since the end of the Cold War, too many Americans have forgotten how nasty Communists can be.

We buy so much stuff from China now that we’ve started thinking of it as just another trading partner.

We try to overlook the fact that the people of China are enslaved by a group of Communist thugs who routinely torture and kill political dissidents to enforce their rule.

Have we forgotten how Communists act?

•  The Chinese Communist Party spent 35 years enforcing a disastrous “one-child” policy that included performing forced abortions (without anesthesia) on young women who wanted to keep their babies.
• China’s Communists rulers currently imprison over a MILLION Chinese Muslims in “re-education camps.”
• Those same Communists are feverishly constructing a nation-wide electronic surveillance network to track every movement of the citizens trapped inside their police state.

So don’t get upset with regular folks from Asia, especially Chinese-Americans.

We should support the Chinese who move here as refugees from Communism. We should welcome them with open arms.

Like all the rest of us in this great melting-pot of immigrants, they came to America for the opportunity to live in freedom.

They came here to escape life in a Communist police state. They came to America because we promise liberty and equal justice under the law.

It is beyond shameful that they should have to endure racial prejudice now.

Asian-Americans are victims of this pandemic just like Hispanic-Americans, African-Americans, Native-Americans, and Euro-Americans.  (Please forgive all this hyphenation. Sadly this is the political world we live in now.)

Presently, the whole world is suffering because of the Communists who rule China. They should be held accountable for this disaster.

So, if you’re upset, remind yourself that the Chinese Communist Party brought this devastation upon us.

At least then you’ll be mad at the people who are really responsible.