Lessons of COVID-19

The Nazi bombing of London during World War II tore apart many houses and apartments, often removing walls and facades without destroying the buildings. The exposure of the interiors gave curious people hints of what really happens behind one’s neighbors’ closed doors. Privacy and pretension are among the things that war demolishes.

The Coronavirus pandemic, now centered in the United States and often equated to war, has ripped apart many comfortable illusions, bringing ugly realities into the light but also examples of solidarity ranging from simple decency to extraordinary courage. Let me lead with the positive because we need hope now more than ever.

Valor and decency are not dead

The doctrine of me (first, second, always) is a hallmark of our economic system, of the political party that controls the Senate and, especially, of the president of the United States. But many people have been immune to the spread of the selfishness ideology. The light side of the Force, to use a Star Wars analogy for this science fiction film we are all living through, has shone brightest among the health care workers who know better than anyone the risk that COVID-19 presents to them.

Notwithstanding the risk, doctors, nurses, an other health care workers have gone into the eye of the storm and worked tirelessly to fulfill their duty of healing the sick. The tributes they have received, from people applauding from their windows in cities all over the world to the Eiffel Tower and the Empire State Building lighting up for them, are richly deserved.

It takes a special kind of courage to speak truth to and irrational, arbitrary, vindictive power, namely the president of the United States, Donald Trump. Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s chief expert on infectious disease, has displayed that kind of courage with a quiet authority calculated to make it hard for the ignoramus-in-chief to fire or marginalize him.

Miami Herald columnist Ana Veciana-Suarez, who writes about family issues, had the guts to step outside her lane and wrote that she wished Fauci were president because he is a “just the facts” kind of guy. Many others feel the same way because Fauci, unintentionally and by the mere fact of truth-telling, has helped fill the huge vacuum of leadership that Donald Trump has created. But neither Fauci nor anyone else has a platform big enough to counteract Trump.

Good health care workers, awful system

The United States has some of the best medical professionals and the most advanced medicine in the world and the worst medical system among all developed countries. We are last among rich countries in life expectancy. COVID-19 has highlighted this contradiction.

This systemic problem won’t be resolved amid a health care crisis, but the crisis will provide lessons in how to remake our health care from a mercenary patchwork into a real universal system with life and health as the primary values.

The inverse of leadership

But all the blame for the toll that COVID-19 will take can’t be laid at the feet of our miserable health care non-system. A crisis of this magnitude calls for national leadership. The president’s antics during this pandemic have been the antithesis of leadership. He has been a pied piper rather than a shepherd: minimizing the crisis, giving out monumental doses of misinformation and conflicting signals, weighing human lives on the same scale as economic costs, grotesquely overrating his own performance and, as always, dividing the nation along every fault line possible to distract from his own failure.

What are Americans thinking?

But there is a graver sickness than COVID-19 or Donald Trump and it resides in about half the people and in the political system. Anybody who tuned to his reality show “The Apprentice” could have pegged him for a sadist who likes to inflict pain on people by telling them “you’re fired.”

This is heresy, no mainstream media figure would ever say this. But frankly, I don’t give a damn if I offend the preachers of civility. The truth is that there is something horribly wrong with a people forty-eight percent of whom could vote for a brazen racist, sexist, ignoramus with a key piece of his DNA missing—the one that makes empathy a natural human trait. And there is surely something wrong with a people who, after witnessing Donald Trump’s disastrous handling of this existential crisis, give him his highest approval rating ever!

Exactly what is wrong is a troubling but interesting question that calls for a book-length analysis. Let’s just say here that fear of a barbarian takeover—read immigrants, African Americans, Latinos, Muslims and all the others that were not well represented on the Mayflower—is a big part of it. Feeding that fear, fueling the fire of hatred it ignites, is the main reason for Donald Trump’s rise.

There is also something wrong with a political system sold as democratic in which the candidate that wins 48 percent of the vote beats the one who gets 52 percent. In this case what is wrong is clear as is the solution. The Electoral College is undemocratic and archaic and should be abolished in favor of a system based on the national popular vote.

The hard part is getting the Republican Party, which today is anti-democratic to the marrow, to agree. The Republicans know that, were they to play fair, for instance by stopping their campaign to suppress the minority vote, giving up gerrymandering, and abolishing the Electoral College, they would be doomed. Thus, they will defend every undemocratic trick they can concoct.

The Party of American Apartheid, like Covid-19, Will Be over Sometime

It Can’t Be Soon Enough

As the nation changes, how long will Republicans be able to hold power on the basis of a narrow base made up mainly of older white guys and some white women?

Something has to give, if not now, eventually. I just hope to still be around when the dam breaks and a river of justice and truth sweeps away all the GOP baloney and bullshit, all the mean-spirited and reactionary Republican ideas, out to sea.