This is the tenth anniversary of this long-neglected blog. (I really need to get a new headshot for this joint.) I have been meaning to start it up again and I have some topics listed and even a couple of essays started. But if I'm going to observe the anniversary I need something up today.
I've elected to cut-paste-combine-edit a couple of observations I've made on the coronavirus crisis on Facebook -- a virus that, in a fit of reactionary pique, I have sometimes called The Virus from the Occupied Portion of China.
Why fatuous? Because while we're being massively advised by experts, our (and their) knowledge changes by the day. Observations that may seem reasonable one day will look dangerously foolish a week later.
I composed the earlier version of the following when it was clear that governments were requiring what amounts to a halt to normal life, a shutdown of the economy, and incarceration of large numbers of people in their homes. I suspect most medical experts would say what follows is ignorant and dangerous, and it may well be. But we are only in the first days of the shutdown. While it's all-for-one for the time being, my sense is that Americans aren't going to tolerate self-jailing and the destruction of their economic lives for a long time.
For now, my thoughts:
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It is surprising how little we have read about the very difficult ethical and political choices facing our leadership, and each one of us. Lower loss of life in exchange for the coerced shutdown of civil society, on the one hand; on the other, greater loss of life if we just let life go on, let people and institutions act voluntarily.
To illustrate this dilemma, take an extreme (and absurd) case: We just GIVE everyone the virus. Some barely get sick; some get sick and recover; some get sick and require more intensive medical care; some die, mostly (but admittedly, not entirely) elderly and already-compromised people. The number of deaths would be startling, and the strain on the healthcare system extreme. But economic activity would instantly bounce back, because all of the actions that are destroying it now are being taken to avoid getting the virus, and we've taken care of that by giving it to everyone. We've accepted coronavirus misery for a healthy economy, social normalcy, and all of the healthful things that they offer.
Of course that won't happen. But consider a middle case between that and what we are doing now that is not so absurd: We don't infect everyone, but we stop the coercive preventive measures and let both businesses and individuals go about their business, let it return to as normal as it can get. People may choose to congregate or not, and businesses open or not, as they choose with recognition of the risks. In that case, some lesser number of people (I would guess a much lesser number, but more than now) will get infected/sicken/die, and we'll have a not-entirely-healthy, but not-completely-moribund economy. (By the way, I propose a federal statute immunizing people and businesses from CV-19-related liability right now except for intentional acts to spread infection; you know there are plaintiff lawyers rubbing their hands out there, and not because they're washing them.)
It would be a difficult political choice, but as difficult as governing during a full-on depression? As difficult as facing an electorate whose jobs have vanished and whose savings have been severely reduced with no end in sight? As difficult as tamping down the contagion of civil disorder (just wait for the first riot and then try putting the lid back on that pot). As difficult as a wrenching philosophical, religious, and political realignment? The horrors of contagion pale next to the horrors of the breakdown of civil society and the ruin of the economy, the evaporation of people's savings, psychological damage to a society unused to privation, with untold number of businesses swept away, crime and civil unrest threatening to evade control, unemployment exploding, and the accompanying demands for government to do something, to take control -- another genii that will resist crowding back into that lamp. (In fact, like national defense, this is one of the few issues on which a strong governmental response is called for; but once acquired, the habit of coercion can expand -- like a virus.)
It's a tough case, trading a healthier economy and social order and risky freedom for some increased loss of life; but think about it: It is not silly to believe that it is the most humane course of action.
But risk-balancing where human life is on one side of the teeter-totter has to be convincingly sold, whatever decision we make about it -- including the present decision to shut down. The times call for a leader who can make the case for intelligent normalcy, who can explain and persuade of the need to balance caution and continuity, who can both inspire and calm, who can remind us in words that unite that the tunnel comes out on the other side.
That leader is not among us -- on either side of the aisle, or, to the best of my ability to observe, elsewhere. So many of us dream of moral and intellectual -- and, yes, rhetorical -- leadership in this country, and it's nowhere to be found.
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