Vaccinated or not, we know it's coming again. It's doubtful anybody reading this will die, it's doubtful too many of us will get seriously ill, but we know that some of us will get it, and we know that some of us will have lifelong problems afterward.
And yet we just can't take it anymore. We're all getting coffee, we're all going to stores, we're all seeing friends, and even if we're taking every precaution, we all know we're spending extra time in places where we shouldn't be. And if we're in denial of the mortality staring us all in the face, imagine how desperate the 35% of the country is to live normal lives who denies the seriousness of COVID-19....
I don't even know if it's denial at this point. I think the human mind is not built to withstand more than a year of behavioral changes before we just can't take it anymore and have to rebuild some semblance of our old routines. Love does not make the world go round, routine does. Routine is what makes sense of life, it gives us expectations, 'if we do A, take care of B, then C and D will happen.' If we don't know what to expect from life, every one of us with a capacity for mental illness (between a quarter and half of us) snaps, and does extremely regrettable things that in ordinary circumstances we'd probably view as psychotic...
In retrospect, we were all a little too careful when it didn't count, and we're now paying an extra price for it. On this issue America's going to have take a hard, glum look at the new reality:
The medical community knew right away that COVID would almost certainly not spread without five minutes or more of indoor exposure, but they wanted to be sure, so they basically compelled the entire country to shelter in place, without emphasizing realistic precautions for those whose ability to survive was dependent on income. In no small part, this is the reason the entire lower income segment of America has rebelled against all medical sense and the country goes into Pandemic: Battle 2.
All we needed for herd immunity was another 20% of the country. We might have gotten so much closer now if we hadn't compelled uneducated lower income families of all demographics into their houses, out of work, not knowing where their next paycheck will come from, with no guarantee of government relief from a President whose most fervent believers don't even believe in government solutions, and whose entire party does everything to spite every low income demographic that isn't white.
If we had emphasized extreme workplace precautions rather than sheltering in place, we might have gotten to herd immunity. Twenty million working class people might have become convinced to take the vaccine because they weren't at home, stewing in the propaganda they watch on television and read online. And if a few hundred thousand more died in the meantime? Well... a couple hundred thousand more may die anyway. And if we'd encountered a million deaths much more quickly, that might have appalled another twenty million into getting the vaccine. And who knows? The social stigma of getting the vaccine might have gone away, and still another twenty million would get it, and there would the 70% herd immunity nearly be achieved.
Yes, getting rid of shelter-in-place might have put the casualties over a million. But look around you, we're probably going to get there anyway. How many of us are going out this summer as though there's no pandemic because we just can't take it anymore? I know I'm going to coffeeshops, and when I'm there, I take my mask off to drink my beverage. But at least I'm wearing my mask when I'm not drinking. A lot of people are going and not wearing their masks at all - people who look sufficiently educated that they ought to know they should.
If we'd buried over a million by now, at least the country would have become so terrified that we might be done with it, because the country would have seen what a matter of life and death COVID is and been scared straight before this became yet another irreparable long term problem in a superpower history's long since marked for a crash landing. But even now, eighteen months in, the country still doesn't get it, and if we don't get it now, we're not going to get it until it's too late.
COVID won't be what does us in. The fight over COVID is what will do us in. All the political capital it would take to fix every long-term problem this country endures is now going into this pandemic. And while we fight a 99% unwinnable battle to convince sixty million more people to get vaccinated for herd immunity, we're staring down the barrel of a decade's worth of irreparable long-term damage to every single American institution we take for granted that keeps us alive. If China had deliberately leaked a biological weapon onto this country, they could not have come up with any virus more effective to wreck the the USA from within. We're staring at an existential earthquake to American political system itself, to democracy itself, to the planet itself - and it's all just in time for global warming to wipe god knows how many billions of us alongside the billions from other species we've already killed. If other countries and NGO's can take the burden of leadership on themselves that could and should have been ours, there's still time to save the world with relatively minimal damage; but at this point let's get real, the leadership is never going to come from here, and odds for proper leadership coming from elsewhere are not particularly good...
What we had last year was a moment of utopian delusion about public health. We believed that with enough effort and communal sacrifice, we could end COVID with it only claiming the people whose time had come anyway. We believed in this community of good will in spite of all the evidence. We believed it in spite of the fact that Donald Trump was President, we believed it in spite of the rise of authoritarianism all around us in a country with half a billion guns and an internet to mobilize their owners, with 20 trillion dollars in debt and a creditor willing to take us to war, with an entire political party whose leader was installed as a puppet by a foreign enemy, with millions of immigrants about to flee global warming and amass at our border, decrepit infrastructure, corrupt banking, and still no universal health insurance during a pandemic.
But the more of us die, the more solutions become possible....
When you set impossible standards for human behavior, people rebel. However many lives sheltering in place saved, the fallout will kill an exponent more if it squanders our ability to solve any other problem. The Delta Variant is slaughtering its way through the whole world. Covid is yet again showing what it does to people without vaccination for all to see, and it even ruins the immunity of the rest of us without vaccination - if enough people don't get vaccinated for long enough, the COVID deniers will have proven that vaccines don't work for a reason they didn't intend: the reason is that that people like them are so irrational that they can't handle this much compromise to their freedom of movement.
Twenty years ago, we had a reciprocal moment when Republicans put absurd numbers of precautions in place for terrorism. We put in place ridiculous measures for airport security, for immigration and customs, torture, rendition without trial, warrantless wiretapping, and rather than relying on multilateral nation-building, we deluded ourselves into believing we could remake any country we wanted in any way we wanted. Anyone who opposed their measures was a social non-person to be humiliated as an accomplice to evil: condemned, censured, even cancelled.... Occasionally academics and celebrities with beliefs perceived as sympathetic to terrorism were ostracized and sometimes fired, and progressives felt widespread paranoia that conservatives would use the warrantless wiretaps and arrests on them in addition to terrorists.
Just like with cancel culture, the paranoia was mostly unearned and stupid, but that not entirely justified fear among progressives was extremely real. The false boogeyman conservatives fear today about being branded a racist or sexist is the same false boogeyman progressives used to fear of being branded an anti-American or sympathetic to terrorism.
Maybe conservative measures did prevent further 9/11s, but the end result was the further emboldening of authoritarianism: neoconservatives got everything they wanted, and it lost them their party, their country, and the world. Why? Because rather than help us heal and pursue realistic counterterrorism goals, a certain kind of conservative practically crowed with triumph at their vindication over the importance of counterterrorism, and gleefully celebrated as their leaders imposed a series of measures guaranteed to make the world rebel against everything they believe in for living memory. The result of that counterterrorism spree: all of the the world's good will to us after the fall of Communism squandered, the American ability to show democracy's competence over dictatorship ruined over Iraq and Afghanistan, the Syrian Civil War (remember when Republicans tried to take credit for the Arab Spring? They were right to... and Syria is the result...), and a refugee crisis three-million strong with untold millions to come....
So now, nearly half the US plans to stay unvaccinated. Why do they persist? Because they know that we have all the same contempt for them that conservatives had for us after 9/11, and nothing inspires ill will like contempt. The ill will of conservatives to progressives today is akin to the ill will of progressives to conservatives after 9/11 - it's the ill will of a portion of the country who knows in their bones that they've been proven wrong on something crucial, and therefore fears they'll have to concede to many unrelated ideas on which they still think they're right - ideas like the narrative of structural forces which favor them...
So rather than concede on what they're proven wrong, the ideologues double down on their wrongness, again, again, again, again, no matter how self-destructive, until the pendulum swings and the world can be reframed again in a narrative that flatters them.
90% of the time, people behave in ways that are basically logical, but during that illogical 10%, even the rational among us behave in ways so illogical that we would rather die than prove people who disagree with us right. Even if the contempt for the unvaccinated is deserved (and it mostly is...), it's not a good idea to let it show. People can deal with relinquishing their lives, they cannot deal with relinquishing their dignity, and if they believe others are out to humiliate them, even if their belief is incorrect, they will rebel to their last 'breath.'
A lot of American leftists like to think of hard-core conservatives as the Christian equivalent to the Taliban. I must say, as ridiculous as it might have seemed twenty years ago, the evidence keeps piling up and up and up. If the America-led world leads to the worst case scenario of global warming, the death toll caused by us will be unfathomably higher than the Taliban ever was.
So if the Republican party really is the American Taliban, we have a golden opportunity treat them that way without ever dropping a bomb. Let them die of the disease, let them spread it. And if some Democrats become collateral damage along the way, what can you do? War is war, and those of us who die are soldiers who nobly gave our lives to the cause of letting our kids survive until they can have kids of their own, and we will honor the sacrifice of the fallen just as we will honor the sacrifice of the stupid who could have saved their own lives if they GOT FUCKING VACCINATED.
Christopher Hitchens used to say of Islamic terrorists: ""If they want to be martyrs then we're here to help." Some of us were opposed to going full force against the Republican party because we understood the risks involved in a way that many of you reading this, really, really didn't... If you try to stop a guy with a gun, you expect to get shot.
This is what it means to go after Republican party with everything we have. If we're in, we're all in, and willing to put not just our lives on the line but the lives of everyone we love. If you feel that civil war with the Republican party is unavoidable, this is how you wage it. God is literally giving us a weapon to wage the war for us. He has sent us a plague to kill them without our having to get our hands bloody at all. Let them kill themselves until they understand their iniquity and repent. If some of us die too, we're all gonna die anyway if we don't solve this in time to solve global warming, and compared to that, our deaths from this will be mercifully quick.
This is the glum calculus of politics, where millions are expendable if it saves billions. Lincoln and Grant knew it, Roosevelt and Churchill knew it, Truman and Eisenhower knew it, and so did Hillary Clinton... If you don't have the stomach to look into the abyss, stay home and look at e-bay.
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