As journalists, even in the smallest capacity, there is always a temptation to shrink away from the hard questions.
There is a temptation to toe the line, to not question one side or the other when their conduct is egregious. This is especially the case when one finds themselves writing in the greatest period of ideological conformity in American history since the Second World War. In America, as in any nation, disaster sometimes inflicts trauma on the population. When this happens, those in charge and those who work under them typically settle on a narrative which assuages the fears of the public and sets the great masses of society in the right direction to fight off the threat, heal, and move forward.
What we have seen with the COVID-19 pandemic, and the national response, has been the worst case scenario for a response to a viral outbreak. From the first day it became evident that Coronavirus would make the jump over the Pacific, the two dueling sets of American political powers warmed up their media machines and got to work on attempting to out-position the other side on the narrative. At first, there was the pivot made by conservatives towards advocating a lockdown of trade and travel with China so as to stop the disease from spreading to the United States. This was met with, initially, a dismissive attitude from the cultural Left who chose instead to fret about a supposed spike in hate-crimes against Asian Americans due to coronavirus-related discrimination.
By the end of March, with schools across the country closed and millions on their way to the unemployment line, the two sides swapped ordinance before they began the next salvo. In his daily pressers, President Trump went from downplaying the severity of the outbreak to touting the probability of a great economic rebound, the so-called V-shaped recovery. This only after it became clear that coronavirus was going to be much deadlier than the seasonal flu. Meanwhile, opponents to the President became vociferous in their advocacy for an unprecedented level of social isolation. Never in human history has the government essentially banned people from making a living on such a massive scale. All kinds of small business owners: gym managers, salon owners, restauranteurs, and others were essentially told that they were to close indefinitely until some arbitrary measure had been reached or until a vaccine was produced sometime in the next year? Two years? And if the virus mutates, as viruses are known to do, what then?
To add insult to injury, while small businesses were slaughtered in an economic depression brought on by government fiat, the Amazons and Wal-marts of the world made millions.
And yet, nearly two hundred thousand Americans have died from coronavirus according to the Centers for Disease Control. That’s more American lives than were lost in the entirety of the Vietnam War, just to put that in perspective. Actually, twice that much at least. Add to that, coronavirus achieved that number in less than a year.
Given all of the economic devastation and staggering loss of life, what are we to do? What would a just society do? It seems that too many Americans are thinking not about ethics, or what is right, but what is politically useful, or what is most in-line with the reigning orthodoxy, which right now, is pro-lockdown.
Ironically enough, in December, before I had ever even heard of coronavirus, I had gotten interested in this creepy, strange, and laughably outdated Russian survival horror game called Pathologic. Released on PC in 2005, the game follows 12 days in the lives of three characters who cross paths in a surrealist, anachronistic town on the Russian steppe beset by a fictional, deadly plague called “the sand pest,” no doubt inspired by Yersinia pestis, or “the Black Plague.” They are united in their roles as ministers to the sick, with one being a doctor sent from the capital, another being a local-born witch doctor, and one being a mysterious young girl with miraculous powers of healing.
I find it odd now, reflecting on it, that a game I spent so much time on over the break would have themes and situations so relevant to our current moment, and I think, can provide a window into considering the actual ethical dilemmas that the public is facing now in the era of COVID-19.
One of those is the haphazard nature of on-the-ground research in regard to epidemiology. If you play as Daniil Dankovsky, the Bachelor of Medicine, for the first several days of the game you are forced to follow leads that often terminate in frustrating dead ends. In the beginning, you have little to no understanding of the plague and how it works. You are then forced to set up quarantine procedures. At one point, you establish an isolation ward in the town’s Cathedral to keep the uninfected safe from the disease, only to have one of the sick townsfolk break the containment, leading to the deaths of all inside. Your decisions as a doctor have massive, often unforeseen ramifications.
This is a reality not reflected in our current discourse, for example, which underscores the nature of our squabbling and inept leadership that they can only think of human death as a tool to bludgeon their enemies. Some would argue that the inconsistencies on the effectiveness of mask-wearing, for example, means that the testimony of the medical establishment cannot be trusted. Meanwhile, others falsely claim that there is an Approved By Science narrative that must be adhered to at risk of being declared a “science denier” and wanting the deaths of the elderly. There is no respect for the complex set of challenges posed by something as difficult as studying an entirely novel strain of respiratory virus more deadly than the flu in a timeframe of only a few months.
Nor is there an appreciation for reasonable differences of opinion that do exist within the medical community. Our society’s obsession with the scientific “consensus” glosses over the fact that scientific fact is not a democracy. Researchers can and do get things wrong.
Similarly, the game holds a mirror up to the unhealthy social and economic consequences of the pandemic that we would like to ignore. At one point in the narrative, Vlad Olgmisky, the owner of the meat-packing factory that serves as the primary source of revenue for the town, locks his workers inside the slaughterhouse in an effort to protect both his own bottom line and the commercial viability of the town. As a result, the population of (mostly Indigenous) workers is decimated as the disease starts to manifest inside the inescapable quarantine zone that has been barred from the outside. As the disease progresses in severity throughout the game, the price of basic goods skyrockets. Citizens turn to theft and murder out of desperation. Depending on how you handle one of the quest-lines, widespread arson breaks out. In other words, the stress of the disease on a closed population center causes a complete breakdown of society.
Is this going to happen in America? No. But it illustrates the point that locking people in their houses and shuttering their businesses while pumping out massive stimulus that mostly helps large corporations, especially those that have political ties, is a recipe for economic devastation for the common man, as trillions of dollars in money is printed out of thin-air in the hopes of rejuvenating the economy destroyed by government mandate, not only are everyday Americans not seeing any of that in the form of another personal stimulus check, but they will actually end up poorer as increased inflation eats away at their future wages. Let us not even consider how Vlad Olgimsky’s ill-fated attempt to save his workers echoes not only the disproportionate effect of the outbreak on minorities but also the abysmal failures of politicians that have been largely swept under the rug by sympathetic members of the media more interested in waging culture war than holding elected officials accountable.
If America is going to have an honest reckoning with the coronavirus outbreak and its consequences, it is going to have to treat the threat as something serious, not a cudgel for warring sides to beat their ideological opponents over the head with. That is going to have to come about through a recognization of the difficult position that health care workers and medical researchers are in in their capacity to advise the public. It will also have to take the form of more compassion and understanding on the part of elected leaders and opinion makers for the Americans whose businesses, oftentimes consisting of their entire life’s work, have been utterly destroyed by lockdowns while Jeff Bezos becomes that much richer.
Overall, it requires an America more mature than the one we live in, one that can examine its pathological obsession with culture war and how it has claimed the lives and livelihoods of thousands of real people, beyond the ideological ecochambers of our own screens.
