Post 61 - May 11, 2020
Day 61…
Science, I fear, is not fixing this fast enough.
A Facebook friend of mine recently posted something that was demonstrably not true.
It was easily disproven by two minutes of research through multiple sources.
It was disproven by interviews with actual people on TV that we’ve all watched in real time.
When I responded to the post with a line-up of the facts from a variety of different sources that contradicted it, what I was told was, “don’t be seduced by fact checking web pages”.
It is easier to believe something clearly made up out of whole cloth that confirms your worst fears than it is to weigh the evidence and accept the difficult truth.
It never ends well in a movie when somebody says, “Hold on everybody, you have to be patient.”
NEVER.
Somebody in a movie says that and the entire movie theatre reaches for their popcorn to see which idiot is going to screw everything up.
And somebody always does.
Somebody does exactly what they aren’t supposed to do - what they have just been warned not to do - and all hell breaks loose.
If somebody didn’t do that, there’s be no movie.
We spend the rest of the film watching our hero fix it all.
This isn’t a movie unspooling in front of us, this is life and it is actually happening.
I don’t know that we have a hero - it seems that nobody really knows what to do.
What we have is a large group of scientists and healthcare workers who are advising us that certain behaviors, based on past experience, are going to lead to certain results.
Coupled with that, we also have leaders, who are telling us what we want to hear often directly contradicting what they are being advised.
This virus has hit us at a particularly vulnerable time.
We are going through a period of extreme political populism.
There is a lot happening out there in the world these days that is complex and difficult to understand and more than anything else, terrifying.
We have elected uneducated leaders who not only refuse to deal with the issues facing us, but also proclaim that everything is great.
There is even a name for this.
The Dunning-Kruger effect.
If you are incompetent, you can’t know that you’re incompetent.
The center of virus-denying, the White House, is now under attack from the virus.
It got in.
The response to this is muddled at best.
The White House is still doing everything that it can to push forward with reopening.
Is the reopening working?
It depends upon your point of view.
It is hard to tell how things are going in places like Florida because the state is making it extremely difficult for new cases to be reported but regardless of that, cases around the country are going up.
Steadily up.
New models predict that cases will continue to rise.
Even in light of that, the White House is still pushing ahead to reopen everything.
People are starting not to care.
There is a rising tide of right-wing populism that is calling for the reopening of the economy at any cost.
There is even a name for this now - it’s called vice-signaling.
It is a public display of immorality with the intent of creating a community of like-minded people.
Bethany Mandel is a conservative writer.
She went to Rutgers University.
She recently tweeted "I'm not sacrificing my home, food on the table, all of our docs and dentists, every form of pleasure (museums, zoos, restaurants), all my kids' teachers in order to make other people comfortable. If you want to stay locked down, do. I'm not."
This goes directly against what those on the left advocate.
The left would term this selfishness and respond with virtue-signaling.
Vice-signaling is what elected the current Administration.
Trying to point out the moral flaws in the actions of the government is not working because the community that has been formed around the vice-signaling that elected them is deaf to those types of arguments.
To that community, “bleeding heart” liberalism is the enemy.
Bethany Mandel is an educated person.
She is part of a large segment of society that is joining together and embracing their selfishness.
“You can call me a Grandma killer”, is how that tweet starts.
She has made the choice to not care about the human cost.
With that tweet she proudly stands up and says that sacrificing lives to fulfill our wants is OK.
And people who also want to go to the zoo will read that and think that they are being given permission to feel the same way.
Once someone has made that choice, how do you argue against their stand?
I am not sure that you can.
Shame is defined as a painful feeling of humiliation or distress caused by the consciousness of wrong or foolish behavior.
Wrong or foolish behavior is defined by society.
Something that causes shame in a person from one country might not register at all with an American.
Something that causes shame in an American might be readily accepted by somebody in another country.
Our society in the United States is dividing. Some would say already divided.
Up until now, what the left has been doing in response to the right has been to try and shame them into behaving in a virtuous way.
The right has decided that what the left views as a virtue is actually a vice and what the left views as a vice is actually a virtue.
The right can’t be shamed by the left because the two groups don’t share the same accepted moral norms.
We are now a society with directly opposing ideologies.
Our President has embraced racism and greed and, in doing so, has created a community around him that believe the same things.
Those things are no longer vices in that community because everybody in that community consider them virtues.
They may have always considered them virtues but kept that feeling hidden.
Now that the President is on their side, they can feel what they feel openly.
I fear that moving forward that more people are going to choose going to the zoo over protecting their fellow citizens.
Shame is not going to work.
It hasn’t worked.
Science isn’t moving fast enough to provide a solution to COVID-19 so people are panicking and looking elsewhere for answers.
And they are finding them.
They don’t care if those answers make any rational sense.
They just want this done.
We have to hold tight.
We have to keep our community together.
There are so many examples in history and literature about what happens when we don’t.
There is a difference between vice and virtue.
As those around us start forgetting what that is, we must remember.
No matter how much they tell us otherwise, we MUST listen to our hearts.
Love wins.
Always has - always will.
How this time?
Not a clue.
But it will.