Vote for your right to live
It’s so true that it’s become a cliché: Our culture has never been more polarized than it is now, at least in the memory of anyone alive today. And this is the most important election in history, sure to determine the direction of the country and even the world for any foreseeable future.
Massive issues hang in the balance – access to health care, income disparity, racial and gender justice, the survival of the ecosphere itself. But, for those of us who might have trouble seeing beyond the scope of our limited daily experiences, we need to face the possibility that our own individual lives are at stake.
With global rates of COVID-19 transmission at an all-time high, with the stark reality that the U.S. leads the world in infections and deaths, with the spectacle of the virus’s spread among the president’s own inner circle, the pandemic is the big news of the year and therefore the central issue of the election.
Yet, in the midst of all the political posturing and misinformation, it is very difficult to grasp the true nature of the contrasting approaches in the debate. To state it simply, though, it is this: one side wants to stop the virus, the other is fine if everyone gets it.
The position of the reigning administration has never been stated in exactly this way, but in hindsight the pattern is absolutely clear. At the very beginning, back in February, the conscious decision was made not to inform the public of the true danger. Once the cat was out of the bag, the initial attitude was that the cure was worse than the disease, clearly implying that the virus was to get a free pass to run its course.
Against the explicit warnings of the experts, states and communities were bullied into returning to business-as-usual long before it was safe. (“Science doesn’t know,” we are told.) The president’s own refusal to wear a mask sent the powerful message to his followers that they should do nothing to stop the spread. (“We need to get our immunities up.”) We were incited to actively ridicule those who bowed to an oppressive authority that dared to legislate our behavior. (“Take that thing off.”) Then, when the president bounced back from his three-day medivac to Walter Reed, he could say first hand that it’s no big deal. (“Don’t worry about it,” he gasped.)
In this approach, the way to combat the virus has been not to stamp it out, as we always have done with such threats, but rather to let it run through the population like a medieval plague. By implication, it is our patriotic duty to stage one giant chicken-pox party so that everyone ends up with the antibodies – everyone who survives, that is.
Such an idea might appear to be intellectually defensible, depending upon how closely we are willing to align ourselves with a philosophy of social Darwinism, leaving the weakest among us to fend for themselves.
The problem is that the risk is unequal. If you have a mansion or a compound to hide in for a year, if you live mainly on investments that regenerate themselves at a distance without your having to mingle with the masses, then you might be able to hang on until the disease peters out due to herd immunity, or until a safe vaccine can be developed. In the meantime, if the dice come up cat eyes and you do test positive, you have the best health care, including, worst case, injections of some experimental cocktail that hasn’t been cleared by the FDA for general distribution.
Is it a conspiracy? No, let’s reserve that term for whisperings in smokefilled rooms and not extend it to this kind of unspoken public eye-winking. That said, the graph of the pandemic’s progress looks just like one that might have been carefully managed – with an imperceptible, slow tapering off of new cases, statistically ensuring that it will get around to all of us sooner rather than later. COVID-19 wards aren’t allowed to get too empty; and, if they start reaching capacity, the level is adjusted with a few minimal gubernatorial mandates.
During these last weeks running up to the election, the laisse-faire camp has mostly attempted to distract attention from the virus – desperately trying to divert the conversation toward the pre-pandemic economy, law and order, or guilt-by-association with some manufactured scandal. When the real issue can’t be avoided, they promise that we’ll have a vaccine any day now – again contradicting the experts.
Clearly, the idea is to create just enough confusion concerning the facts until we can get past the election. But what will happen afterward? If the reigning ideology prevails, there will be no incentive to limp along for six months or a year in the hope of cajoling millions of people into taking the first vaccine that’s available. The end of the ordeal will be more certain if we just stick to the original plan of getting everyone sick.
And, of course, at that point we will have no choice in the matter. As long as a certain percentage of the population is contagious – with one person infecting a certain number of others, those others going on to infect their quota, and so on – the virus is sure to win the day.
We don’t really understand much yet about this disease. For all we know, we may not be fully immune even after we get it. Or, in being airborne, it might simply be too contagious to contain.
What we know for sure, though, is this: One party in this fast-approaching election promises to at least try to stop it while the other is guaranteed not to. So, yes, your vote may be about what kind of culture you want to see during your lifetime, but it might also be about how long a lifetime you get. Don’t think about it too hard.