Bucks over bodies: America’s pandemic an ethical challenge

As we face yet another crisis in the history of the United States of America, I recall these inspiring, galvanizing words reportedly spoken by Franklin Delano Roosevelt during his first inaugural address on March 4, 1933. It was four years after the infamous stock market crash that plunged this country into the Great Depression. FDR, the 32nd president of the United States, “stepped up” and led this country out of one of the worst economic debacles in our history.

Unfortunately, on Feb. 19, 1942, almost 9 years later, he seemed to have totally forgotten these powerful words about fear. His fearinspired Executive Order 9066 led to the incarceration of between 110,000 and 120,000 JapaneseAmerican citizens in camps located in Hawaii, the Western United States, the Midwest and the South. The fear generated by the devastating Dec. 7, 1941, Pearl Harbor surprise attack by the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service led to a revenge-oriented clouding of this nation’s moral compass, thereby producing FDR’s ill-conceived Executive Order 9066.

In 2020, the United States is reeling from yet another devastating sneak attack. This time, the enemy is a sneaky villain known as COVID-19. As I write this article, the tally of those stricken and killed has continued its momentous rise. Sadly, more Americans have died in this relatively short three-month coronavirus war than the number of Americans killed in the almost two-decades-long Vietnam War. Unfortunately, there is no president with the gravitas, temperament and skill of FDR or LBJ to “step up” to lead the country out of this confounding mess. Instead, we have state-run fiefdoms and a chaotic,broken health care “system” where medical professionals and support staff are heroically trying to stem the onrushing tide.

Things are so bad that on April 20, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick told the entire country on Fox News that, “There are more important things than living, and that’s saving this country for my children and grandchildren, and saving this country for all of us.”

Unfortunately, Patrick is not the only one in a position of governmental authority in this country who has succumbed to this feardriven, crass calculation. Across the country, in state after state, government officials are putting lives at risk in order to “save the economy.” Not surprisingly, the people who are and will be most at risk are, as usual, the elderly, the poor and communities of color. At the end of the day, it is bucks over bodies. Once again, as with the WWII Japanese-American concentration camps, we have, as a country, lost moral clarity at a time when we need it most.

People of faith, in particular, need to stand up against this murderous mentality. In my Islamic religion tradition, we have an idea of justice that is so universal that Harvard Law School has posted it outside of its legal library. It is an English translation of verse 4:135 of the Quran that reads as follows:

May those of us who believe in a merciful, just God band together and say “no” to bucks over bodies, and remind all Americans, as FDR did 88 years ago, that “we have nothing to fear but fear itself.”