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| DATE | 2020-04-19 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
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| SUBJECT | Subject: [Hangout - NYLXS] virus lessons
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MainOpEdsThe Coronavirus Crisis so far: Six interim lessons
The Coronavirus Crisis so far: Six interim lessons
Our task is not to accommodate ourselves to a threat. Our mission is to
defeat the threat and set limits for it, rather than for ourselves.
Off. (ret.) J.E. Dyer
Off. (ret.) J.E. Dyer
J.E. Dyer is a retired Naval Intelligence officer who lives in Southern
California and is Editor-at-Large for Liberty Unyielding,Her articles
have also appeared at Hot Air, Commentary’s Contentions, Patheos, The
Daily Caller, The Lid, The Jewish Press, and The Weekly Standard.
More from the author ►
Although it remains to be seen how far we are into the turnaround in the
USA from the coronavirus shutdown, there was a sense from the White
House briefing on Thursday that it’s where the movement and energy will
be. We’re looking forward, not back at this point. The Washington Post
commentary is designed to snark it up and keep the focus on danger and
immobility, but the White House has an organized framework for moving
forward. And there are governors already working actively to reopen
their economies.
At the outset, a few words about the White House’s framework. (The
briefing video is at the bottom.) It’s not “a plan,” per se. It’s a
set of criteria for safe reopening and a basis for consultation with the
states. If you look at the slides outlining that, it’s obvious many of
the states must already be looking at the factors listed, such as the
ability to test for the virus.
What the White House task force has laid out is what they expect to be
consulting with the states about. I’d interpret it as a minimum set of
reopening factors, which the states should address, and which the White
House and executive agencies will be giving them assistance on, as needed.
It’s a very “CEO” type of communication. “This is what I want to hear
from you about. Come back to me with what you need.”
There’s still a long way to go to put the coronavirus crisis behind us.
But it’s obvious the American public, especially the millions who have
taken it in the economic shorts over the last month, are ready to move
on with that. We can’t shelter in place forever. That’s not what we’re
here on earth for.
We have to take the moral value of human life, lived to its highest and
best, in freedom and with virtue, creativity, joy, and possibility, more
serio-usly.
One observation of overarching importance before laying out the six
interim lessons. The observation is this: we cannot, must not choose to
let the virus rule over us as a limiting factor for everything about our
future. This virus or any other virus, we must not accept it as a
millstone pinning us down and driving us in a circle for the rest of time.
Well-intentioned professionals in epidemiology, like Dr. Fauci, continue
to issue their warnings about how long everything must take, and how we
will probably never get back to everything normal for us only six or
eight weeks ago. But ultimately, that is not for the epidemiologists to
decide. And that’s a good thing.
Our task is not to accommodate ourselves to a threat. Our mission is to
defeat the threat and set limits for it, rather than for ourselves. To
do that, we have to take the threat seriously. But we have to take the
moral value of human life, lived to its highest and best, in freedom and
with virtue, creativity, joy, and possibility, more seriously.
With that in mind, here are six lessons to start a dialogue with.
About the virus
1. At the core of the outbreak, the problem has been two factors that
produced combustion: the ease of travel around the globe, and the
refusal of the national leadership where the virus originated – China –
to tell the truth about it in the crucial early weeks.
I am leaving aside, for now, the whole question of whether the COVID-19
virus is naturally occurring or exactly how it may have entered the
human population. We haven’t confirmed those points, but we don’t need
to, to treat others.
Considering only the two factors mentioned above, we have a robust and
vital combined lesson. One aspect of it is that the ability to halt
travel at national borders has been indispensable. The other is that
relying on the nations to deal faithfully in matters like viral
outbreaks is a form of trust that needs some means of accountability and
verification.
The balance of nationhood, borders, and robust but regulated travel is a
good one, and we need to perfect it further.
We don’t have any such means. The World Health Organization proved
useless as a broker of information; it merely parroted China’s talking
points while the virus was zipping around the globe undetected, in
infected but still-asymptomatic hosts.
The remedy here is not to shut down travel in some dramatic and
permanent fashion. It most certainly is not to weaken or eliminate
national borders. National borders and the power behind them protected
millions of people from communist predation in the last century; we have
just seen them protect millions from infection by a highly contagious
virus in this one. The balance of nationhood, borders, and robust but
regulated travel is a good one, and we need to perfect it further.
What to do about compelling better faith from a national leadership like
China’s is a more difficult problem to scope. Up to now, President
Trump has elected not to “go there,” but it’s virtually certain that at
some point, we’ll have to. I doubt we’ll try to push anything through
the U.N., at least while Trump is in office. National intelligence
efforts targeting a nation like China; the threat of ejection from
global bodies and forums; sanctions – these seem to be the likely
mechanisms for reaching a “trust but verify” modus vivendi.
Consultation among the nations is a positive good, but it needs teeth
and accountability. We need to reconsider multilateralism and ponder
the benefits of nationalism-in-concert, with the emphasis on nations
getting together, as opposed to “global” bodies purporting to prioritize
for everyone.
2. We need to think harder and with more foresight about dealing with
epidemic disease. I am not convinced that the only way to deal
effectively with COVID-19 was to shut down entire national economies to
the catastrophic level we chose. This is partly because of the virus
itself, which early on demonstrated that its fatality rate was strongly
skewed to people over 65.
It is merely not logically necessary to freeze all the people under age
65 in place to give the people over 65 the best chance of survival. We
absolutely want to save the lives of our beloved elders, but doing so
almost certainly didn’t require declaring vast chunks of our national
economies “non-essential.”
It is also fair and necessary to make this point: state of the art in
any endeavor, including treating and curing disease, is always a
transient and evolving thing. President Trump has been right to praise
and recognize the many ways in which industry and the research community
have stepped up. But for me, there has been a nagging sense that we’ve
been doing what the military has always slapped itself afterward for
doing: fighting the last war instead of the current one.
Does it really require a minimum of 18 months to develop a vaccine? Is
a “vaccine,” as we understand it today, a measure whose features cannot
change to become more effective or convenient? How about detection?
Can we speed up our adaptation and invention to do that? What do we
need to think about differently in terms of discovery and invention, to
get ahead of this problem in that way as opposed to heaping
rearward-looking regulatory burdens on humans?
If we start out by dismissing these possibilities, we are guaranteeing
ourselves a future of being whipsawed by the next contagious virus, and
the next, and the next. Only by asking these and similar questions with
an open mind, and pursuing with determination answers that are
gratifying for the value of good and abundant human life, will we
actually get beyond the dynamic of being warned by epidemiologists that
there’s no telling if we’ll ever be able to attend NBA games with 20,000
screaming fans again.
Wrong answer. But we have to ask better questions to get the right ones.
3. This is a brief but critical point. New York City is an outlier. It
is not the standard by which we should decide how the entire nation, or
indeed how most of the world, should be shut down to arrest the spread
of a virus.
This account of infection and deaths from COVID-19 is a vivid visual.
It simply is not necessary to plan or execute as if there is anywhere
else in the United States, where so many people are crammed into such a
small area. A comparison:
The needs of New York City, as opposed to other locations, are indeed
somewhat ironic. Nowhere would it have been as useful as in NYC to shut
down mass transit to inhibit the spread of the virus. But nowhere is it
as necessary as in NYC to keep mass transit going to have the most
essential services: hospitals, emergency workers, retail food, household
items, and prescription drugs, public sanitation, power, water.
If anything, New York City shows us that piling people on top of each
other in higher urban concentrations than what we have now is a terrible
idea, if we want to be less susceptible to a contagious disease. The
more spread out people are, the less readily an infectious virus is
likely to spread.
About the broader reaction to the virus
In the coming days, we should have robust and wide-ranging discussions
on these topics. Here I will only attempt to outline them. I’m sure
this list isn’t comprehensive, but the issues are massive ones, striking
at the heart and soul of human organization. The coronavirus will
compel us to think and talk about them, and that’s a good thing.
Instead of addressing them over the last four-plus years, we’ve been
yelling at each other about Donald Trump. It’s time we focused on what
actually divides us.
4. The COVID-19 virus has shown us in stark terms how anxious some among
us is to take advantage of a crisis. In some states, governors and
mayors have insisted on levels of control over the public’s behavior
that have no reasonable purpose (e.g., prohibiting people in the entire
state of Michigan from walking across their yards to visit their
neighbors, or banning people in Kentucky from attending a parking-lot
church service in which everyone sits in his car with the windows rolled
up).
But taking advantage of the crisis goes well beyond imposing
unreasonable limits on daily life. In Congress, the Democrats in both
houses have tried to completely transform how Americans vote as part of
the “stimulus/relief” measures for dealing with the coronavirus (e.g.,
here and here). That is not only precipitate and wrong-headed; it’s
unconstitutional. The states administer voting and should continue to
do so without federal mandates (i.e., for universal by-mail voting)
usurping their prerogatives.
We have also seen the “green” lobby step forward promptly with polished
proposals to take advantage of the disastrous, self-imposed collapse of
our economy to implement “green” agenda measures. That doing so would
completely alter people’s future expectations, requiring everyone to
live in a very different way, is basically acknowledged, if not highlighted.
What is not so well framed is the point that we actually have no idea
the full scope of the consequences we’d be inviting on ourselves if we
were to pursue such an agenda. But we can foresee things that would
cause a whole lot of people to fight now rather than have to give up on
life later, due to the ideological mandates levied by others.
A great deal of managerialism and mandate-levying has come swarming out
of the woodwork in the virus crisis (there are far too many examples to
list here; just one would be the steep, discouraging set of criteria
California’s Governor Newsom wants the state to meet before opening its
economy up again. One of them is the ability to require and administer
blood tests before people can go back to work – apparently on an
open-ended basis for the foreseeable future).
This virus episode has clarified that we are not all pulling for the
same thing in America. There are millions of people who do not see
these agenda items as necessary, much less as elements of a desirable
future. Not only that, the mindset behind them is one there is no
compromising with. The government is either in thrall to it, or not,
and if it is in thrall, its reach and behavior are unacceptable.
5. The COVID-19 crisis is a watershed on the most essential human levels
because it has caused the relationship between man and the state to
surge to the fore. This is the topic one could spend the most time on,
but I will present only one dimension of it here.
The COVID-19 crisis is a watershed on the most essential human levels
because it has caused the relationship between man and the state to
surge to the fore.
It’s what I think of as the “lowest common denominator” theory of
“government control” (for want of a better expression). An excellent
reference point for this is how anti-gun activists seek to have
government treat competent, law-abiding citizens when it comes to guns:
that is as if they are no more trustworthy than the least trustworthy
among us. The activists want to constrain and restrain everyone as if
we are all mentally ill, hardened criminals, senile, or too juvenile to
be trusted with any responsibility.
In the view of the anti-gun activists, someone is always armed, but it’s
always agents of the state. No freedom of any kind can ultimately
survive this imbalance, which is why America’s Founders put the Second
Amendment into the Constitution.
In the current crisis, a similar pattern has been public authorities
imposing restrictions on everyone that are really only necessary for the
most vulnerable parts of the population. Although it would have been
stupid to encourage healthier, less-vulnerable people to contract the
virus to develop immunity, it was dumb equally to issue directives as if
everyone were over 65.
It is also actively stupid, especially when so much of the country is
seeing hospitals nowhere near capacity (because tending to non-urgent
medical needs has been deemed non-essential), to insist that continuing
to restrict movement on a lowest-common-denominator-of-vulnerability
basis is the only option. At some point, the reality has to set in that
we must have the young and robust working if everyone is to have
something to eat. (Not to mention having toilet paper and paper towels.)
But the crucial point here is not the one about our specific, current
crisis. It’s the point that there are decisions the state should not be
in a position to make for us on a prophylactic basis – even though
viruses, like guns, are lethal things. The state is just other people,
chartered to carry a firearm and enforce mandates. It’s not a magical
force that knows more than we do or acts more virtuously or knowledgeably.
In an age when it is literally possible to notify everyone immediately
that he is required to stay indoors, and police are increasingly
empowered to act as if we are all criminals waiting to happen. Our
social media profiles tell them just when that will be, it isn’t good
enough to leave this matter unaddressed. The relationship of the state
to us is already changing, in ways that need not be inevitable, but will
require decisive action to intercept. The virus has thrown that into
vivid relief.
6. The final interim lesson is one we will learn much more about in the
coming days. It is that the longstanding federal-state dynamic in the
U.S. is under increasing strain – and this isn’t even about Trump and a
list of Democratic governors. It’s about a development that may have
been inevitable, to some extent, but that could pose a significant
threat to our future as a nation.
The lens we see it through is the regional alliances governors have
formed in the last week to consult on reopening their economies. This
may be too new an idea to go over easily with some readers, but there is
very little chance of being wrong in this assessment: the pattern bodes
ill for our national unity and the proper powers of the federal government.
I wrote earlier that no such effort is ever agenda-free or a mere
seminar experiment in government organization. Some of the things these
alliances could do are amass bargaining power versus the federal
executive, develop lists of demands, and generate blocs in the Senate
and House that effectively override the traditional lines at the
national level of party and principle.
The representatives of the seven Northeastern states led by New York
don’t all vote the same way in Congress. The same is true of the
Pacific Coast states and the Midwestern states. But if there is
momentum for an interstate brand of “regionalism” – until now, a
phenomenon urged by activists at the city-county level – these alliances
could, in fact, rewrite one of our most basic political realities in
Washington, D.C.: the check conferred by the U.S. Constitution,
especially in the Senate, of more-rural areas on mass urban population
centers.
In blunt terms: as the map stands today, this move – given the states
that have jumped on it – could hardly be better designed to gain a
blue-counties power position over America’s red counties.
The regional state alliances aren’t likely to go away when the virus
crisis can no longer be their purpose. That is especially the case if
they rack up any political victories that can be attributed to their
existence and use. As Rush Limbaugh likes to say, Don’t doubt me on
this. This is something to be concerned about.
White House briefing
In the video, the gist of the current situation and framework outline
for reopening starts in minute 19:00, with Vice President Pence briefing.
The writer is a retired Naval Intelligence officer who lives in Southern
California and is Editor-at-Large for Liberty Unyielding. Her articles
have also appeared at Hot Air, Commentary’s Contentions, Patheos, The
Daily Caller, The Lid, The Jewish Press, and The Weekly Standard.
--
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that Brooklyn, like Atlantis, reaches mythological
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