COVID-19 is having some dangerous effects on the country. I don’t count its lethality among them. While any death is a personal tragedy for the individual and within a community, any disease with a better than 90% survival rate isn’t an existential threat. This isn’t yellow fever that erased entire towns and kept New Orleans from balancing its birth and death rates for a century. It isn’t typhus that destroyed armies, or plague that depopulated entire regions, or malaria, that kills hundreds of thousands every year. The only exceptional thing about COVID-19 is that it’s affecting affluent Westerners, who hitherto vainly believed their medical systems would preserve them from the realities of nature.
Most of the harm of COVID-19 derives, not from the disease, but from the response to it. Each person has only a limited number of days in his life. Depriving him of those days, by confining him in his home or closing his place of business, robs him of a precious and irreplaceable percentage of his life. Whether it’s wait staff losing months of income, students losing lessons that could have been learned, a business losing months of sales, an athlete losing a season’s competition within a fleeting career, individuals losing the chance to congregate to enhance their professional social webs, or simply young people missing a chance to develop healthy interpersonal skills, outside of the toxic arena of social media, at a crucial period of their maturation, it’s all time lost forever, it’s all opportunities that will never come again.
Another ominous aspect of the COVID-19 response is the uncritical acceptance of the advice of experts. As children, we are taught to accept what authorities tell us without question, but as adults, we weigh different perspectives and formulate our own conclusions while we understand that “truth” varies with the expert expounding it. The knowledge of experts is as narrow as it is deep, and knowledge doesn’t equal wisdom. An epidemiologist’s dream may be to leave everyone isolated from each other forever, but that’s a nightmare to others. Confining people to their homes to prevent the spread of disease addresses one problem only by creating innumerable other, equally severe problems.
Perhaps the most disturbing facet of the COVID-19 response has been the rush to surrender power to the government. In a progressive society of intelligent, mature people, different individuals make their cases for the appropriate response to any challenge the community faces. After a spirited debate, a course of action is chosen. In an autocratic society comprised of immature, ignorant people, a few people in power dictate what the population will do, and then use the full force at their disposal to command obedience. It’s disturbingly easy to see which of those societies we are turning into.
I’ve read how Donald Trump is a wannabe dictator, but, to his credit, he has shown tremendous restraint in exercising federal power during this hysteria, and has been respectful of states as they elaborate their own responses to COVID-19. And yet, many people are upset with him for not using his power to facilitate even greater federal interference in our lives. This public lust for a dictatorship of the administrative state has become depressingly pervasive. Being cared for by an all-powerful maternalistic system seems to have great appeal for the many who clamor to surrender themselves to it in the foolish expectation it will take care of them.
Adults can assess a situation and determine what level of risk they are willing to accept in return for the opportunities they pursue. Adults make both good and bad decisions regarding those risks and rewards, but to deprive them of that choice is to infantilize them. Currently, the people of this city and this state are being denied the freedom of that choice. It was taken away from them without their expressed consent and without any public discussion or democratic process. It’s time to stop treating everyone like children and return to them the right and power to make their own decisions.
John Blasiak is a Greenfield resident. Thoughtful comments are welcome at henrycarlyle@outlook.com.