We are all responsible for each other.
I don’t think that should be a controversial statement in a nation many claim is founded on Christian principles. We are all responsible for each other. The people we revere in this nation, Lincoln, King, Dorothy Day, William Lloyd Garrison, even John Brown all believed that and put that into practice.
I don’t take any responsibility at all.
-Donald Trump
The president of the United States does not share this belief. The president of the United States believes that we are all responsible for maintaining his approval rating and ensuring the re-election he so desperately needs to avoid criminal prosecution, but he doesn’t believe there is any reciprocal responsibility from him or his office — two entities that seem to have merged into one in his addled brain.
“I don’t take any responsibility at all,” said the man who fired the people in charge of protecting usfrom pandemics, turned down the World Health Organization’s offer of testing kits, and has consistently lied about the scope of the threat and the measures his administration has taken to keep us safe.
The president, through his words, actions and ineptitude has made it clear, we’re on our own. He can’t even be bothered to set a good example by not shaking hands. We are all responsible for each other.
That means we need to heed the experts, not “commin’ sense,” as a dear friend so beautifully put it. We need to understand that bans of large gatherings aren’t needed because it’s bad, they are needed because we’re trying to stop it before it becomes bad. We need to understand that no matter how badly we want to go to Mass, one sick priest giving communion to 500 people can change the trajectory of the virus.
Even if we feel healthy, we need to understand that we can spread it to people in high risk groups, including the elderly, the immunosuppresed and those with diabetes. We need to realize the single largest group of people who have the disease in South Korea are 20-29 year-olds. The reason they have so many more young people is they are testing everyone. We’re not even testing everyone who has symptoms. We can’t even separate people who have the disease from those who don’t in airports.
I started this blog with The Plague in mind. I thought of Camus’ novel as as metaphor for the trump administration, as it’s a metaphor for so much else. Now we’re living it. It’s a great book and you should read it. It’s a great guide for what we’re going through now. But there’s one thing that jumps out at me now. The dead in the book have no names. The are, for the most part, anonymous plot devices. The Plague is the story of the survivors. If we don’t take responsibility for each other right now, we will look back at each other, feel bonded and remember the times we all pulled together. But we’ll give scant mention to those who didn’t survive. Not on any kind of scale beyond remembering our own individual dead. Those who lost people will be alone, responsible for their own grief.
We are all responsible for each other. It’s not a hard concept.
Oran Today 