Opening Now Shows How Feeble We Are

And we should be pissed. But at the right people.

Corona-Sunset by lforce.

The traffic on my ten-minute commute has been steadily thicker as Texas is “opening up” despite being terrifyingly unprepared. It makes me angry. It’s okay, the lieutenant governor told us, because old people should be willing to sacrifice their lives so our economy can thrive. It’s a bizarre zero-sum analysis that rests on a faulty premise; not only old people die from SARS-CoV-2. But even by the most cynical calculus, sacrificing our elders to return to normality is a lose-lose situation. The normal state of things is the reason we’re in this mess. A gangbusters economy does not make a healthy society. We’re like addicts watching a friend OD so we won’t be implicated. Even those for whom that normal was temporarily working either lament or turn a blind eye to those for whom it never did.

I have been bitterly replaying these thoughts in my workplace as I go to and from my station. I don’t want to participate in this mayhem anymore. To be tempered, I remind myself of something I wrote a few weekends ago. I should be grateful I have a job. It’s insane and ignorantly privileged to be resentful about being employed right now. I don’t know how I’d feel if things were different. What if my company closed and fired everyone, as some enterprises have? But it’s also insane and ignorantly privileged to accept what’s happening.

We have all shined a light into the cave for a consistent message about what we are supposed to do. It’s a melee down there. We’re told we’re to “reopen” but that people are going to die because of it. We’re given dates. Those dates are retracted. One government says one thing. A smaller one says something else. Businesses and schools are left to their creativities. Hopefully they do the right thing. Some probably have. In this grand abdication of decisive leadership, a heavy burden is placed on the individual American to respond to a crisis that encompasses all of humanity. The fears of people who have lamented collectivism’s impending extinction are coming to bear. We are not in this together. Some people can crowd beaches while others are forced to hole up. Some are assaulted for wearing a mask.

We feel sincere angst over this. But much of that worry seems directed at the wrong places. We’re not responding gracefully. We’re taking hesitantly to dubious cues from seductive, compromised sources. What else would you expect us to do? All we want is to go back to work.

Amid the talks of reopening, a Texas salon owner pulled the trigger early, propping her doors for customers. She was sentenced to a week in jail for reviving her business against government rules so she could feed her children. There was a public chastising of the court system from conservatives who latched onto the case for rhetorical fodder. She should be allowed to open, they said. The lieutenant governor will pay her court costs, saying the judge overreached. But they’re only being cynical. The real tragedy is that people cannot absorb several workless months without making life-or-death decisions about their finances. That’s how weak society is. In this bind, we are forced to rely on our neighbors who very well may not have the wherewithal to help us. Who are probably drowning, too.

The same people who intentionally shaped the American economy that way are the ones forcing it to open back up. In pressuring states to relax restrictions, the federal government has pitted localities and individuals against each other, gladiator-style, to see which ones will kill the others off. Americans in different places compete for resources. They’re at each other’s throat. The TSA hoards masks. Weird uprisings are fomented. Employers’ morals are now at odds with their existence. A business owner in Georgia noted that that state’s opening put him in an impossible position. This wasn’t a bumbling accident but a calculated game of hot potato with the proverbial “buck.” Since Georgia said he could open, he had no excuse to stay closed, no excuse to keep his workers safely on the dole, no excuse to do what the situation dictates. He was no longer be eligible for state help. He was forced to either let his business die or put his employees’ lives at risk and those of their loved ones. It wasn’t a state ban on speed dating that did that to him. Deep down, we know it’s unsafe if the government tells us we can go back to normal.

Yet people rage in bizarre protests. They are styled like a military act. They march on significant places, halls of government. They coil to strike posture. They carry weapons. There are so many of them that they could take the Capitol for a time a la the Bundy requisition of Malheur. Blue lives seem to have stopped mattering. The demonstrators are reconciled to infect each other and innocent bystanders with a deadly pathogen. It’s not a cry for help. It’s not an airing of grievance. It’s a message. Such behavior in many contexts would spur assault and maybe manslaughter lawsuits. But not these ones. These ones are different for some reason. Photos show these protesters screaming in the faces of stoic public servants at capitol buildings. A man stands on capitol steps with a military rifle. Did anyone else notice it — his beard invoking the mask of Bane?

Still, there’s a pitiful element to their bearing. The protesters seem of the prepper vein — draped in camouflage, shod with combat boots, ready to wait out the end of days. Tough-looking. Mostly white. Yet the substance of their message is to demand the full reopening of Applebee’s and Lowe’s. They need their Starbucks. They want mani-pedis and professional hairdos. They don’t want financial help from the government. They want to ply their trades. This part is understandable. We have crafted a society in which people tie their identities to how they’re employed. You’re not a human, you’re a “welder,” a “mover,” a “mechanic,” a “soldier.” Government help through a crisis destroys that identity. What if you have to do something different? You can no longer be defined as a “welder.” You’re not what you were. You’re now simply “you.” It’s a terrible thought for someone who lives in a culture that foregrounds occupation and brushes away humanity.

There is a strong partisan air to these objections. Protesters complain that a Democratic state governor banned motor boating since unneeded gas purchases could increase SARS-CoV-2 spread. Of course, there are legitimate questions. People wonder why pot and liquor stores are open when the gardening section of Home Depot is closed. These inconsistencies seem perplexing. But I’d wager most instances of such contradictions are easily explained in the limnological diffuseness of our political layer cake. Differences of approach exist across municipalities, counties, and states, and in the echoing vacuum of central leadership such discord seems only natural.

A better way of saying it is that they’re all responding the best way they know in a void of guidance.

That is cold comfort, of course, to human beings who need material to work their various crafts so they don’t lose their minds when stuck inside. I sympathize with this. But the physical world doesn’t account for human whims. It requires specific things that do not yield. One official said “the virus makes the timeline.” Settle in. The harsh reality is that we must become comfortable with boredom. Indeed, we must become comfortable with economic collapse. I don’t mean that glibly. It’s not to suggest the economics of this thing does not cause immense suffering — pain I am currently insulated from. But hear me out.

While our public infrastructure is worn to its nub, we live in a time of overstimulation. Humans have socially evolved to have a device or a being that exists outside our bodies always holding our attention. A dog to walk. A Pikachu to catch. A watering hole to frequent. We go places. We do things. We have book clubs and 5Ks. And we don’t like anyone taking those things from us. Among humans, Americans are especially conditioned to bristle at government rules that we curb any type of behavior.

“Quarantine is for sick people; you lock sick people away,” a man told a radio station. “But when you lock healthy people away, that’s tyranny.”

This is a treacherous instinct. It reflects a perverse notion of freedom that lets us explode lead slugs into wherever we wish but is agnostic on whether we should have access to clean water or green space. It’s the kind of freedom that lets us drive the capitalist gift of a gas guzzler while our neighbor is enslaved by hunger. It has led us to wrongly believe leaders are using the pandemic to advance an authoritarian state. It makes us think the government is too big.

What I mean when I write that we must become comfortable is that we must build a society that can stand the ravages of a pandemic. This is not the last of such disasters. If we can’t survive this one, what will we do as climate change becomes inexorably more serious?

Our economic protections are lean and our way of life fat. These are incompatible things. Together, they mean everything falls apart when coasting. There’s no resilience. Most in the United States could not afford an unexpected $400 expense before the pandemic. They’d have had to leverage savings or credit or to take out a loan. That slow crisis is worsened by this fast one. Many more are being hit with unexpected draws on their finances, these from the opposite direction than we expect. We’ve been knocked off the aberrant throttle that sustained us, letting out the ghost in the machine.

The halting response to this cataclysm symbolizes eroded, not bloated, government. It has left every system in the United States gasping for resources and direction. That state governors are casting about hopelessly for a middle ground is a sign of incompetent federal leadership and systematic destruction of federal crisis management. It is not a malevolent taking of guns or overthrow of the right to till ground. In total, what we criticize as state overreach is in fact a colossal dearth of imagination, flexibility, and optimism about collective action.

To illustrate this, I could describe the lengthy timeline in which the current administration eliminated and starved public bodies designed to respond to pandemics. But I’ll let you Google that. I could address the decades-long fundamental disarming of the public sphere that followed the Reagan administration. But that’s also easy to research. Or I could point out that the administration has choked off resources to certain places because its figurehead doesn’t like them.

Instead, what’s germane is the regime of guidelines the federal government distributed to local governments and individual Americans some weeks ago. That rubric details specific, material activity that could help curb virus spread and the pandemic’s duration. You’re familiar with these. For individuals, follow the rules of your local government. If you feel sick, stay in your home. If you test positive, fully isolate for two weeks. Avoid gatherings of more than ten. Stay six feet away from people. Wash your hands. Wear a mask.

Governments should meet specific metrics in terms of response capacity and trends of community spread. Build an efficient and accessible testing system that can detect active and asymptomatic cases. Conjure an army of contact tracers. Protect the practitioners of industries we have deemed essential. Create safer mass transit. Build robust ICU capacity. There is no timeline for these requirements. They are simply what must happen before …

None of this is fun. But if we long for messaging that’s consistent, a sturdy and unshakeable set of rules to follow, this is the best we’ll do.

There would be relief in this if not for the way these guidelines have been communicated. The chieftain responsible for this sensible and comparatively facile framework for responding to the coronavirus is eschewing it. Each of his daily cracks at the lectern contains ignorantly cheerful statements about how soon things are going to be “normal.” His people reluctantly follow the act on an impossible tightrope of walking back the joviality. For a time, he refused to social distance. He touched shared microphones. He shook hands. He patted shoulders. He’s said to toy with the idea of getting back on the campaign trail. He will force military service members to unnecessarily expose themselves to the virus and quarantine for two weeks so he can give an academy commencement in person. He tells people to ingest cleaning chemicals. Worse, he tells people to break the rules he advanced by conflating liberty and patriotism with social irresponsibility and a malevolence toward people who think differently. After his comments, public servants have been assaulted and killed for trying to enforce rules imposed in their jurisdictions.

Outside his pageants of insularity and disrespect, he has forced the states to allow meat processing plants to stay open despite the industry’s unwillingness to provide its workers the safety equipment called for in his guidelines. Those workers are getting sick and dying. He has encouraged supportive governors to reopen their states. He has constructed barriers to crucial medical equipment for hospitals in the states of governors who criticize him. This is an ancient wartime tactic wielded against enemies. The governors are forced to fly in clandestine night missions to obtain wares. They evade federal agencies in order to protect their healthcare workers. His milquetoast advisor and son-in-law says the American economy is soon to be “rockin’.” Behind the scenes, the son-in-law deployed a group of neophyte logistics managers to procure supplies from the president’s cronies. The president is going to rebuild the greatest economy in world history “again,” this time in his image. So he decided he didn’t need his task force on the crisis yesterday, announcing he would disband it in favor of “something in a different form.” Today he reversed course after learning how “popular” the task force was. It improved the ratings, so why not keep it? The pandemic is not over, but the president has grown bored with it.

Almost no local or state government has met the federal criteria for beginning to reopen. New York City’s cases are level, but in the rest of the United States, they are growing. On the eve of Texas’s opening, Dallas County, where I live, saw its largest single-day jump in cases since the pandemic started. There was no flatness of curve, let alone a weeks-long downward trend. Testing is about half what it should be nationwide. There is no national posse of contact tracers.

The leader is naked of a mask — and of clothes. The push to open while ignoring the situation is meant as sleight of hand. It’s intended to paper over the pitfalls the pandemic has exposed in our social and political system and to conceal the desperation the executive clearly feels. We’re not supposed to notice that they’ve stepped up efforts to deregulate harmful environmental behavior, boost vulture capitalism, and bestow on employers the right to endanger their workers’ health and lives. Perhaps it works in the now. But when oral histories are logged it will be difficult not to recognize the “managers” of this tragedy as the hucksters they are and how feeble we’d become.

Still, we have the means to recognize who did what. We can send these people to space so they’re not taking up so much room. We can fill the vacuum they leave with a caring and generous society. The capital exists in the United States to make sure no one misses a paycheck. There are enough hotel rooms to make sure no one sleeps in a parking lot. We can demand government reform itself to defend and provide for vulnerable people — migrants, prisoners, the unhoused, artists, freelancers, the jobless, the food and land hungry, children.

We missed the boat with this tragedy, and that’s what makes it an opportunity to do better. But we should be honest with ourselves in assigning blame. If there’s a part of the government we should mad at, and there is, it’s the top.