American attitudes make virus response a hard sell
When Americans are summoned to deal with an attack or defy overwhelming odds, the response typically goes something like this: Fight. Hold the line. Stand together. This won’t stop us. Keep on living your life. We will prevail.
Some of the coronavirus language from leaders has mirrored this imagery. “An invisible enemy,” President Donald Trump called it. “We’re at war with a virus,” Joe Biden said at Sunday’s debate. Said Bernie Sanders: “We have to act dramatically, boldly.”
Contrast that with a meme that has been popping up everywhere on social media: “Your grandparents were called to war. You’re being called to sit on your couch. You can do this.”
The arrival of the coronavirus, and the muted methods being recommended to the public to arrest its spread, are a hard sell for some Americans, and that’s not surprising. Literature, movies and advertising have always shown us otherwise.
The central mythology across much of the country’s history, from the Puritans to the frontier to 9/11, has been about getting up and going out to do what needs to be done – not staying home, being quiet and practicing what can look a whole lot like inaction.
“We’re beginning to see that the traditional ways that Americans may handle adversity may be coming up a bit short,” said Daryl Van Tongeren, who teaches psychology at Hope College in Michigan and has studied how people find meaning in suffering.
Part of that is because the imagery doesn’t quite fit. We’ve been conditioned for generations to be a certain brand of rugged-individualist tough; now we’re being asked to be tough in a way that’s completely different.
This time, unlike a World War II or a 9/11, there is no willful human enemy, only nature creeping along silently and incrementally. As a war, it’s configured far differently than the ones we’re accustomed to watching and waging. And the dramatic, bold action for most among us will be near-hibernation, which is easy to mistake as a couple steps short of cowering.
“In America, we don’t do subtle and subdued,” said Lorenzo Servitje, an assistant professor of literature and medicine at Lehigh University.
This “war,” Servitje said, is unlike most standard Hollywood fare. “It’s boring, difficult, challenging. It’s not everyone running around with machetes and fighting against people who become cannibals overnight. It’s trying to home school your kids, manage finances, reconfigure the way we’ve been doing things.”
Some still respond defiantly – like the crowd in Nashville shown partying on Twitter early Sunday, or young people angry at the cancellation of their sports seasons.
“I think we have a bit of a false sense of invulnerability. And situations like this shatter our assumptions,” said Van Tongeren. “We think if we fight hard enough and use sheer willpower and outmuscle it, then we’ll conquer it. But that can cause us to ignore wise advice from experts. If we think of this as an enemy we might have to outsmart instead of outmuscle, then we start to think differently.”