Thread by @yhazony

It comes down to this:

Some of us think it’s *very* important to avoid having lots of other regions sliding into medical system collapse—with untreated patients dying in hallways while sick, desperate doctors working round the clock do triage and save the fittest.

We’re willing to make sacrifices to avoid this scenario.

And we’ll still want to even if the utilitarians succeed in showing that letting old patients die untreated in hallways is financially beneficial for the rest of us.

This is not because we are panicking or irrational.

It’s because we’ve spent three thousand years exposed to a Jewish and Christian teaching that our parents and the aged are to be honored.

And you can’t honor your parents and the aged while you are sitting and calculating that, really, we can live with a wave of blown out hospitals because most of us younger people will get off with just minor flu symptoms.

The reason that so many are so brain-dead on this subject is that in a liberal society, the idea of owing *honor* to our parents and grandparents is taught almost nowhere.

Most people don’t seem to even know what would be involved.

The basic point is that the commandment to honor your parents and the aged isn’t primarily referring to doing easy things like buying presents or giving complements to older people who are healthy and able to appreciate it.

The commandment to honor older people involves doing things that are really hard to do and that we really don’t want to do.

Like taking care of sick, miserable older people who don’t necessarily appreciate it—especially when we can’t remember why it’s worth it.

Look at it this way:

If it were easy to honor your father and your mother as they get old, it wouldn’t have made it into the Ten Commandments.

There were lots of other moral principles jockeying for that slot. But they didn’t make it in because this one is very hard to do.

It’s at least a question whether our current habit of dumping our aging parents into old-age homes where someone else takes care of them even puts us in the ballpark of honoring our parents and the aged.

But let’s suppose it does.

That doesn’t mean we can take the next step and say:

“There’s a novel virus crisis and it would just be WAY TOO MUCH TROUBLE AND COST to make sure we have enough medical staff and ICUs operating so that there aren’t untreated old people dying in hallways. So let’s just skip it.”

The reason we cannot take that next step is that when we agree to let our parents and our aged die like beasts—it is we ourselves who are reduced to the level of animals.

Being a decent person means that there are lines you just don’t cross.

One of those lines is crossed when the current, young, strong generation feels it owes nothing to the older, weaker, dying generation that brought them into the world.

And that exactly what is implied in all these grotesque comments about how coronavirus is killing people who would probably have died soon anyway.

You forget that we’re *all* going to die soon anyway.

The only open question is whether we act honorably or not while we’re here.

And you can’t be acting honorably if you’re figuring:

“What’s another two or three years of life to him anyway?”

Or:

“What does it really matter if she’s got a respirator or proper medical attention? She a goner soon either way.”

Yes, if you thank that way, you’ve really been reduced to some kind of vicious animal.

It’s not just selfishness—not just deciding that you don’t want to sacrifice your time and wealth for someone else.

It’s worse than that:

You’re incapable of the simplest responsibilities to those who gave you life, protected you and sacrificed for you and taught you everything you know.

Everything you’ve got is because of them. But you can’t be troubled to protect them in their last days.

Many politicians, academics and journalists have built careers on the party trick of showing how every problem really reduces to economics—to GNP growth and how the market is doing.

Often, these are people who scoff at the possibility that the Bible has anything to teach us.

But not every problem reduces to economics.

Some problems reduce to questions of loyalty, and to what you are willing to give up in order to be loyal—and I mean truly loyal—to people who were loyal to you a long time ago.

This epidemic is said to attack the elderly disproportionately. And this is forcing us to show what kind of people we are.

Do we really have to discuss our parents and the aged as if their lives matter less?

As if we don’t owe them honor?