The Patrick Henry avatar remains a prominent American ideal—the mystique of the rugged individual—indefatigable, unflappable and unchangeable; give me liberty or give me death. Well, that is indeed what the choice has boiled down to. For the time being, I am advocating against liberty and against death.
The liberty we sacrifice in this case amounts to passive resistance as a means of winning a war, social distancing being the primary strategy that will defeat the coronavirus. We win by retreating into our imaginations, by getting to know our families better, by reading, making an improvement on a musical instrument, painting, learning a complex software suite, taking a crack at actively navigating a wild bear market or whatever it is that sustained periods of time apart from society may inspire. We are such a handshakin’, high-fivin’, fist-bumpin’, bro-huggin’, joint-passin’, buffet-eatin’, chip-dippin’, ride-sharin’, subway-takin’, airline-flyin’, concert-goin’, casual sex-havin’ society, how are we ever going to adjust?
We will need everyone’s voluntary cooperation. We will need government to help workers and small businesses suddenly upended by this. We will need large corporations to provide work-at-home solutions for employees. We will need community in the large and small sense of the word. We will need to embrace a sense of shared destiny. We will need people to cease socialization for a few months. We can mitigate this to a large degree, but in order to do so, we will need all of this.
The United States is on the upswell of a wave that has not yet crested. Think of it as a climate crisis in miniature. We are failing at climate crisis response, largely because it is an enemy we cannot see and whose crisis point is decades out—a profile tailor-made for human ignoring. The coronavirus has closer to a one-month envelope before its potential crisis point, and that seems indeed to be within the scope of human strategizing.
We are at the front end of what appears to be a solid understanding of the danger, albeit six weeks too late, and albeit without much coherent messaging from the Trump administration. Communities and corporations have taken this over, rendering the federal government a dead and bloated thing, a dull-eyed impediment, a nuisance if not for its checkbook, irrelevant to strategy or communications. The Trump administration has shrunk into miniature or has been distended to vile and bizarre grotesqueries over this, its image a comic reflection in a funhouse mirror, engorged in one place and elongated in another, all where it shouldn’t be, all in distorted disproportion. Everyone but the truest devotees to the realm understand that Trump’s cabal of amateurs, sycophants and witnesses are hopelessly out of their depth when it comes to actually managing a crisis. Fortunately, communities and businesses are largely ignoring the lies and bogus recommendations coming out of the White House.
This thing is a beast, and it is going to tear into this country all through spring and summer unless we get and stay serious about social distancing. Our trajectory is on a par with Italy and Iraq, not with South Korea or Germany, both of which have flattened their curves. I read a Johns Hopkins analyst this morning who approximates 50,000 undiagnosed cases in the US right now at a minimum. With statistics indicating a three to six-day doubling, that puts us into millions of cases by summer absent vigilance about social distancing, which in turn translates to overwhelmed ICU capacity. Some promising reports came through today, but we have to keep our foot on the gas. We are just beginning to respond appropriately to this as a nation, and we cannot blow it now. Write or call, but don't come by. It's the thought that counts, and you must know I love you.
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