It’s been 20 years, at least, since Americans felt safe.
The incoming Bush administration ignored warnings by departing Obama administration national security officials. (See article here.) Perhaps the 9/11 terror attacks couldn’t have been prevented anyway, but Bush and the people around him hardly could have done less to prevent them.
We still live with the aftershocks. And, “Terrorism is still a lethal threat,” CNN‘s opinion editor writes (here). “The lives lost on September 11, 2001 remain a national heartbreak. For many Americans, it has been a long time since they felt really safe.”
Then came Covid-19. Beforehand, scientists knew a contagious and deadly respiratory virus might appear. There had been previous scares. But this is the Big One, at least until a Bigger One comes, if one ever does. Its global reach has killed over 4.6 million people, including nearly 660,000 in the U.S. alone, which ironically is among the hardest-hit nations, with more deaths than any other country.
Of course, the terrorists were to blame for terror attacks, and Covid-19 (so far as we know) is a natural phenomenon, not man-made. But the foremost duty of our government is to keep us safe, with a secondary responsibility of protecting the prosperity we create for ourselves, and when I talk about blame, it’s in the context of how well our public officials and political parties fulfill those expectations.
Bush’s response to September 11, 2001, was to invade the wrong country. He rightly treated the attacks, and our response to them, as a war. But Saddam Hussein and Iraq had nothing to do with it. The use of torture on detainees, not all of whom were guilty, is a black stain on our nation and served to undercut our moral capital in the world while producing little or no useful intelligence.
So, too, is the racism that appended itself to our national outrage, manifesting itself in hate crimes that shock decent people’s conscience (see, e.g., story here). Although invading Afghanistan to topple the Taliban, who harbored Al Qaeda, was the right and necessary thing to do, U.S. troops would be stuck there for 20 years, and a Democratic administration would bungle their final withdrawal. The missteps weren’t solely by Republicans or conservatives.
Now fast-forward to January 2020, when Covid-19 arrived on our shores, and all that has followed. The virus has now killed more Americans than all of our wars put together, excluding the Civil War, which killed more Americans than all of our other wars put together. It has put a remarkable strain on our society, which is split right down the middle, along partisan lines, on what to do about it. And the views on that issue couldn’t be more opposite, nor more oppositional. Covid-19 is the defining political conflict of our time.
Both sides can’t be right. Just as reality and facts are objective, not subjective, and exist apart from us — they aren’t whatever we want them to be, no matter how vehemently we insist they are — so, too, there are right and wrong ways to deal with Covid-19 to limit and minimize the damage it does to us. By way of analogy, the earth is not flat, even if some people may believe it is, nor is it 6,000 years old, as some religionists insist; it’s about 4.5 billion years old, according to our best science-based calculations. With respect to Covid-19, the damage control must be addressed both on individual and societal levels.
Health experts, doctors, and scientists had to figure this out piecemeal, learning from experience as things progressed, but we have a pretty good understanding now of what works, at least, what works as well as anything can. And in the broad scheme of things, they’re right, and Republicans have gotten it all wrong, to the point where they’re arguably prolonging the pandemic, increasing its casualties, and put the rest of us in danger.
“Today a raging Covid-19 pandemic is reshaping the US and the world,” the CNN writer said. “The new concerns that keep people up at night are about the health of family and friends, overcrowded hospitals, breakthrough infections and the risks unvaccinated children may face.” Many people started the summer fully vaccinated and “ready to celebrate,” a doctor said, taking “a deep sigh of relief that the worst seemed to be behind us.” It wasn’t. “Daily infection rates are more than three times higher than they were last Labor Day in the U.S.”
The truth is, “the world is never going back to pre-Covid normal.” Our best option isn’t fruitlessly trying to turn back the clock, but to “move forward.” But so far, we don’t agree among ourselves on that.
A writer for The Atlantic, quoted in the CNN article, says, “Americans are plainly unnerved by the pandemic’s persistence, but the administration’s miscues haven’t helped. Messages from government officials have zigzagged between dread and overconfidence.” He’s speaking about what has happened since Biden took office and a new team took over the federal policy response. “A unified government response has frayed as the White House continues to clash with federal agencies eager to affirm their independence in the post-Trump era.” He’s talking about fights within the federal government, not the fights between the Biden administration and GOP-controlled states. And he complains, “Even as Biden vows to let science steer the fight against COVID-19, politics also seems to have influenced his strategy.”
So there’s that. But this hardly absolves the Republican resisters and obstructionists.
Another CNN editorial writer says, “The United States is hardly the only place where some people are afraid of vaccines, angry at pandemic restrictions, open to wild conspiracy theories, and distrustful of experts. But there’s one key reason why the world’s wealthiest nation, home to many of the planet’s top public health experts, is the red-hot bubbling epicenter of a pandemic that just won’t quit. The U.S. is one of a few major countries where the people pushing against common sense measures hold positions of power, where they can shape policy, influence large swaths of the population, and weaponize the pandemic for their own political benefit.” She’s talking about Republicans. And for that, they are responsible.
Getting in specifics, “Some red-state governors, eager to win the support of former President Donald Trump’s base and damage Biden, are standing in the way of the steps needed to fight the pandemic, [she] noted, and voices in conservative media are spreading misinformation that can prove deadly. Those who are promoting false cures and pushing against vaccines and masks to improve their political prospects are contributing to thousands of new deaths, destabilizing the economy, and keeping the rest of us from getting back our lives,” she says. And she’s right about them.
The CNN article quotes Jill Filipovic, a Seattle native and CNN contributor with a background in law and economics, on the weakening forecasts for the U.S. economy (the stock market, reacting, began selling off last week): “We know who is responsible …. As businesses shutter, parents are forced out of work, Americans have fewer dollars to spend and fewer places to spend them, and life as we used to know drifts ever further out of our reach, let’s be clear about who is responsible: the anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers and their proponents in conservative media and in the Republican Party.”
They’re paying a personal price. Nearly all the deaths are now among the unvaccinated. Red states with low vaccination rates, and often also with less health care access, are being slammed the hardest by the Delta variant surge. No one should revel in anyone else’s suffering, but neither can we save these people from themselves. But we must try to save our nation’s children, including their children. Now, the battle between what works and stubborn ignorance is shifting to the schools. A vaccine approved for kids is likely coming, possibly soon, but isn’t here yet. Children now comprise nearly 30% of hospitalizations. And Republicans are doing everything they can to put them in danger, including rioting at school board meetings over simple things like masks.
Biden isn’t a political giant on the level of an FDR or JFK. He lacks their firm grip and ability to inspire. In leading our nation’s Covid-19 response, he’s mixing politics with public health exigencies. After the initial relief of defeating Trump, some of the shine is wearing off his presidency, and he’s dropping in polls. There’s more to our Covid-19 response than one person, of course, but as our national leader, he’s at the focal point and is the public face and voice of our national policy response to this crisis, and the chief policymaker. He also sets the tone and provides moral leadership.
But whatever Biden’s failings may be, you have to think of the alternative. He’s not Trump, DeSantis, or Abbott. We would be so much worse off if they, not he, were captaining America’s fight against Covid-19 right now. He’s better than any Republican I can think of, including Chris Christie, who’s wrong when he says the vaccinated are sufficiently protected from the unvaccinated (see story
here) — has he never heard of breakthrough infections?
For all of Biden’s shortcomings and shortfalls, he’s at least steering us in the right direction. The biggest mistake people can make is reacting to his mistakes, and his administration’s miscues, by putting Republicans back in charge, starting with the 2022 midterm elections. Biden and the Democrats aren’t perfect, and you can plausibly take issue with some of their specific policies and actions. But the Republicans have it completely wrong, and that’s what should guide voters as our nation continues to thread its way through what some people have begun calling this generation’s World War 2.
Meanwhile,
here’s some good advice for kids.
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