I still can't get over that we just had no plan -- as a society, apparently -- for a plague. These events are so common in human history, that it's like a society having zero ability to prosecute a war -- either via its own military or via alliances. That's how dumb this is.
(It's actually not true that we don't have a plan. We have paid taxpayer money for various pandemic plans, like this one: cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/6…
We' were just totally unprepared to implement any of them.)
We' were just totally unprepared to implement any of them.)
Anyway, everyone everywhere knew this was coming, & we all knew it for the same reason we know wars happen. Even our elites knew it was coming. We just chose to not prepare for it. That was a choice we made, just like if a society chooses not to have a military.
Like the way some societies choose pacifism deliberately & if they get invaded then they just can't do anything about it? Well, here in America we've chosen a kind of pandemic pacifism, where when we get invaded by a virus then we have to pick between a Depression & mass death.
So there's just no excuse for us being in the state we're in, especially since, say, Japan isn't in the same shape. In Japan, they get to have both an economy & an effective pandemic response AT THE SAME TIME. It's amazing, but they made a choice to be ready to do that.
Why the rant? I just read some op-eds in various places (WSJ among them) about how we have to find a way to end the lockdowns & return to work. Yeah no kidding, geniuses, but y'know the time to find that way was before all this happened.
Here's America 2020 in a nutshell: calls for a "wartime mobilization" against COVID-19. War is our only mental model for collective action. We actually need a "pandemic-time mobilization" but we don't even have that mental furniture. That's not even a bucket we can put things in.
Wouldn't it be great if we were so serious about fighting diseases as a society that if we got into a war we had to call for a "pandemic-time mobilization" against an enemy state? The idea seems preposterous, right?
He has made a bad situation worse, but to blame it all on him is to give him WAY too much credit. This disaster is decades in the making. We made a set of governance choices that far predate Nov. 2016 that have brought us to this moment.
