Against the president’s unspeakably sick notions that America’s first and only priority is to make sure he wins re-election, and that the government must do all it can to propitiate the stock market, even at the potential cost of millions of lives, we have the overwhelming force of moral rightness and basic facts on our side – and both need to be deployed now as if our lives depended on it. The willingness of many on the right to consider accepting the deaths of countless Americans based on a deluded vision of shortening the economic pain appears driven by a combination of avarice, cruelty, a eugenics-inflected view of the most vulnerable members of our society, and, in the apparent willingness to sacrifice elderly parents in the process, unresolved issues of the tragic Greek persuasion.
We have to joke a little, because otherwise we might begin to scream in horror at cost-benefit analyses from the president that would have us think of deaths from coronavirus as akin to the random toll of car crashes, deaths from flu, and other needless losses at the hands of drunk drivers and an unfair medical system. It is a belief system that looks at America and doesn’t see people or families who together form a society of love and solidarity, but only units of production, employees to be squeezed or marks to be bilked, like some mad widget factory owner in whatever Dickens novel you care to choose. In short, they don’t have a different moral system than the rest of one so much as lack one entirely, and we need so say this in unison if we want to break their plans to sabotage the lockdown before it’s had a chance to be effective.
As far as the basic facts being on our side, the best thing I’ve read today is this piece by Ezekiel Emanuel, where he gives us the bad news: we have a couple weeks left to stop this epidemic from becoming an epic catastrophe – and also the good news: there’s a path forward to stopping its spread that doesn’t call for sacrificing our fellow Americans or gutting the economy. He acknowledges that keeping the economy from crashing is completely valid, but also stakes out the overwhelming reality – that there can be no healthy economy without stopping this epidemic. And he sees a way to stop the virus while limiting U.S. deaths to as low as 100,000 – horrific, but far short of the figures in the millions that could occur even under non-worst scenarios. They include a national shelter in place policy; an accelerated testing program; ramped-up production of necessary medical equipment; and increasing hospital staff, including training non-medical professionals to assist in vital jobs. Everything he proposes sounds like common sense, and none of it involves sociopathic talk about how many seniors need to be sacrificed per point of GDP. It simply involves our government getting its act together, making the right strategic choices, and implementing. As we are beset by talk of America being open by Easter, if only enough Americans are willing to let themselves die in Christ-like sacrifice, Emanuel’s ideas and those of other health professional can provide a benchmark by which the public can assess whether what our government is doing to stave off disaster is rational and purposeful, or whether it’s acting in ways that fail us all.