I have a friend, a relative actually, who is sick with COVID-19. It’s not just her, but her husband and her son. The boy is hospitalized. As I write, I don’t know their condition or prognosis. I don’t know what’s going to happen to them, but I don’t want it to be more sickness or death. I suspect more and more people are coming to this realization. As the cases spike, as the sickness spikes, COVID-19 is going from an abstraction to a concrete threat to the people we love. And we don’t see the way out. We don’t see it, because there is no one to twist our head toward the path we have to take and shove us down the trail, painful as it might be.
“Leadership,” said Tom Landry, “is getting someone to do what they don’t want to do, to achieve what they want to achieve.” We all want COVID to go away. We all want to save our economy and keep our jobs. We all want to have dinner and a movie with our friends and our lovers. But we don’t all want to pay the price. This is not, ultimately, a failure of the community, though that concept has been under attack for 40 years in American politics. It’s a failure of leadership, at the federal and at the state level.
There is no one to make us do what we don’t want to do, to achieve what we want to achieve.
We should have been told in March to put on our big-girl panties and step up. Those of us who could work from home should have been told we’re going to have to kick in a little more to help those whose jobs can’t function in a lockdown. Other countries did that and aren’t seeing a spike and are in much better shape economically than we are now. But our leaders told us to choose between our lives and our livelihoods. We couldn’t have both. Then they listened to the mob and they went away. Now the message is we need to live with it.
What they really mean, is we’re going to have to die our way out of it. Rather than take a little more money from those who are working and give it, temporarily, to those who can’t, we’re going to stage the Pandemic Games. Those who die will be the old and weak. And we’ll come through the other side of this Darwinian nightmare with the herd culled. That’s the plan. That’s all we get.
It’s all we get because we have leaders who want to rule, but not govern. They want the pomp, but not the circumstances. They don’t have it within them to call on us to make sacrifices because the very concept of sacrifice is alien to them. Sacrifice is something other people do for them. The Me Generation is in charge and their poisonous selfishness is filtering down, as it always has. When they do take action it’s too little and too late.
Masks aren’t enough. Social distancing isn’t enough. Lockdowns aren’t enough. We have to do all that and more. We have to test, we have to contact trace. We have to redistribute some wealth to help people get through to the other side. We have organize centrally and plan from the top. But no one will say that. No one will sit this country down and call it to action, call it to duty, call it to sacrifice, because no one on in position to lead knows anything about action, duty or sacrifice and they’ve gotten to the point where if they don’t know something, it doesn’t exist. Learning isn’t possible.
Instead, they only offer blame and rationalizations. It’s the goddamn protestors who are spreading it. It’s the people in bars congregating and singing so close to each other (churches? what churches, God doesn’t spread plague in churches, at least not my church). Everyone of us is allowed to say “not me, it’s them.” Everyone of us is allowed to say “they’re making their choice to go out, not masked. If you don’t want to catch it, avoid those who are spreading it.” It the epidemiological equivalent of “look at how she was dressed, she was asking for it.” That allows us to sleep at night, safe knowing that if we hang out with the right people and don’t walk down dark alleys, it could never happen to us. And if it happens to someone, well, they weren’t us after all.
But there is a greater responsibility. The mob has never exercised restraint. It has to be either tamed or conquered. Taming is harder. Taming means convincing people to give something up, not just wrenching it from them when their lack of restraint becomes inconvenient or offensive to you. But taming the mob pays off. Taming the mob brings out the better angels of our nature. Because, when given the call, Americans will answer it. When asked to sacrifice, when told why they are sacrificing and when shown that sacrifice is the only thing that has ever made this country great, Americans will answer that call.
Among the WWII souvenirs my grandparents kept were the ration books. We never paid any attention to them when we were kids. The uniforms and the flags and the pistol were all much cooler. But as I got older, I realized those things were close to meaningless. There were two artifacts in their house that showed American exceptionalism. One was the ration book limiting the gas or sugar or coffee my grandmother could buy. She kept that book and those stamps and I think she did it for reasons other than helping her grandchildren get good grades on their social studies project.
The other was the Bronze Star citation honoring my grandfather, not for feats of glory on a battlefield, but for feats of mercy in a death camp. He got drafted, shipped across the sea, left his wife and infant son, traveled all over Europe with a medical unit, not to kill, but to save. The Jews in Dachau weren’t Americans. They couldn’t die their way out of the Shoah. But some of them made it out because Pop and an entire nation behind him didn’t talk about greatness, they achieved it. The work for which he was honored had nothing to do with individual Americans exercising their freedom. It had everything to do with what makes America great. Helping people. Working together. Sacrifice.
Oran Today 