There's no question that our nation is despairing over COVID-19. It feels like people have given up, or are heedlessly killing each other with this virus. That, if only we were better, kinder people, we could unite *without the government* and conquer this dread disease.
It's a wonderful film plot, but it's just not how these things work. You, as an individual, can and *must* mask up, socially distance, avoid indoor gatherings, non-essential travel, etc. You cannot develop a test-and-trace regime, or a managed isolation scheme.
You cannot close shopping centres or bars. You cannot retrofit buildings to be less hospitable to airborne diseases. You cannot manage the supply chain of PPE or medicine, nor administer the creation and safety trials of new drugs.
You cannot give billions in much needed income replacement to millions of people who are being put of work. You cannot devise and carry out a nationwide vaccination plan. You cannot curtail air travel.
Only the government can do these things. And that sense of despair you, as an American, feel arises from that. It is a yawning, incomprehensible gap that cannot be filled with your individual virtue added together with everyone else's. It *just can't.*
Individual acts are additive. Collective acts are multiplicative. And a pandemic is, regrettably, all about multiplication.
What I despair about is that our individual sacrifices--past and ongoing--have been squandered so ruthlessly by the worst of us in power.
What I despair about is that our individual sacrifices--past and ongoing--have been squandered so ruthlessly by the worst of us in power.
We want someone to blame. A fool who went to a 50-person Thanksgiving gathering is a terrific candidate. Why not them? If only they didn't exist, if only people like them just *stopped*, surely we'd be better off.
But if you're falling back on hoping for individual virtue to save us all, you're forgetting how society works.
To move millions, you need incentives, hard and soft. The US government has provided precious few of either.
To move millions, you need incentives, hard and soft. The US government has provided precious few of either.
And in an economy where millions are forced to work, in person, to keep the wheels of capital churning it seems perverse to me to fixate on private vice--when it is the vices of private capital that are having a multiplicative effect on our woes.
For the armies of women, men, and others who are breaking themselves to put food on your locked down tables, you owe them more than the gaping silence that pervades otherwise loud moral condemnations of some random jackass without a mask.
This will be a season filled with grief, empty chairs, incalculable loss. If I thought for a second that I could shame people into avoiding it, I would. But I know I can't. Because in the end, it's not the fault of the victims. Not truly.
And, by the way, not for nothing but so many individuals have stepped up, going above and beyond. Volunteering, making masks, giving shelter to people without homes, protesting for a better world, performing desperately needed mutual aid.
I wish we heard more about *those* people, who are doing the utter limit of what individuals are capable of to fight this pandemic, instead of about every wanky scofflaw, every K-Mart Karen.
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