COVID 19 cases reached their peak six weeks ago with almost a million new cases in the United States on January 14. Since then they have plummeted a full 93%! The still-vocal pandemic deniers add that to the fact that the omicron variant was apparently less deadly and demand an immediate end to masking and vaccinations. Let’s look more closely at those figures, though.
In the two years since the novel coronavirus arrived in the United States, we have lost 946,000 family, friends, and neighbors. Why those deaths are an acceptable price for our “freedom” not to mask and not to vaccinate is mystifying to me. But it also understates the costs. The data is still preliminary, but somewhere between 30 and 40% of people who tested positive for COVID (that is a positive test, not a hospitalization, or even a sickness) suffered lingering symptoms for at least three months! So even that staggering figure of nearly a million deaths doesn’t fully describe the cost.
Then there is the difference between us and other countries. Yesterday, after a month and a half of rapid decline in new cases, the 14-day average of new deaths in the US was 1872. The 14-day average of new deaths in the whole world was 8833. That means that 21% of worldwide deaths was in the United States alone, which has only 4% of global population. Yet people are still yelling about infringements on their freedom.
Freedom has been a cornerstone of the United States since its founding. One way of understanding that is that it is that freedom is the opposite of slavery, and that the white Founders defined themselves in opposition to the Black people they enslaved. But the persistent and bizarre suggestion by pandemic deniers that mask and vaccine mandates are slavery suggests another way to define freedom by an opposite. Wearing masks and receiving vaccines are practices that benefit our neighbors as well as ourselves. So perhaps we should understand American freedom as the opposite of relationship.
Every time I hear someone say that the “only” people who are vulnerable to COVID are those with “pre-existing conditions” I cringe. Not only is it untrue, but it also implies that somehow these other conditions are their fault and therefore not our responsibility. One of those “pre-existing conditions” is age and the claim that children should be at school, in person, and unmasked, regardless of the danger to their own grandparents is just demonic.
We seriously entertain the notion that our “freedom” to own and walk around with semiautomatic weapons supersedes our responsibility to our children, who regularly practice hiding in their classrooms from deranged killers. We allow this despite the fact that - as a result - we Americans shoot ourselves and one another at twenty-five times the rate of other wealthy nations! Could there be any greater evidence that we value our own freedom to do whatever comes into our minds over our relationships with other people?
Perhaps not greater evidence, but certainly there is more. The pandemic showed just how ludicrous our insistence on tying medical care to employment, or to our ability to pay for it ourselves is. But freedom. The pandemic showed how criminal our insistence on tying housing to our ability to pay for it is. But freedom.
And then there is this war in Ukraine. Americans of both parties seem to be incapable of seeing death and destruction through any lens other than their political affiliation. Republicans bizarrely insist that Putin would never have dared launch such an invasion in the face of fake tough guy, Donald Trump. Democrats happily scold them with the reminder that Trump was impeached the first time precisely for refusing arms to Ukraine unless they fabricated evidence agains Joe Biden’s son. That latter is true, of course, but how does that help Ukrainians struggling under the bombs. Defenders of the Russians on the hard Right and the hard Left both insist on NATO provocation. The provocation was apparently taking seriously the Ukrainians’ idea that they might want protection from Russia.
And why are we so deeply concerned with the plight of everyday Ukrainians under the Russian rockets? Where was our concern for the everyday Iraqis under our rockets? Where is our concern for Somalis under our rockets? Our concern for Palestinians and Syrians under Israeli rockets? Our concern for Yemenis under US rockets fired by the Saudis?
Some of this is clearly related to who is doing the bombing. If we, or our allies, attack someone we lose all our empathy for the people whose lives and homes are destroyed.
Some of this is clearly related to who is being bombed. I think it is clear to most people that the Ukrainians receive more sympathy because they are white Europeans. The Bulgarian interior minister explained his willingness to welcome Ukrainian refugees by pointing out that they are not like the “other” refugees Bulgaria is rejecting, Africans and Arabs.
You look at a story or a picture or a video and you have to ask yourself explicitly: “Where am I in this?” In other words, with whom do I identify. There were people who looked at the murder of Ahmad Arbery and identified with his killers: perhaps because they would like to murder a Black man themselves, perhaps because they would have been frightened if they had seen him running down their street. But if you identified yourself with a jogger, stopping because of his curiosity about a construction site, you understood this as a lynching.
In Lakȟótiyapi, the language of the Lakota people, prayers and formal speeches are often closed with the phrase mitákuye oyásʼiŋ, which can be translated as “all my relations” or “we are all related.” This is the opposite of the egocentric freedom that demands the license to serve myself, regardless of how it affects others.
When employers insist on the right to underpay and abuse in order to enrich themselves, will we identify with them or with their employees?
When caterers insist on the right to reject and humiliate customers, will we identify with them and their hateful beliefs, or with their gay customers?
When landlords insist on their right to put people into the street, will we identify with them or with the evicted?
Mitákuye Oyásʼiŋ
Update February 28: Reflecting on this in the light of a new day I realized that I had actually understated the toxic egocentrism of the focus on “freedom,” because it doesn’t really center individual rights, it centers my individual rights. Your right to love who you want doesn’t exist if it contradicts my view of… of… of the order of the universe? Really it’s the same for your right to control your own reproductive system. It’s even the same for your right to vote, or be a citizen. When the Tucker Carlson Right insists on their freedom not to be called racist, they are transparently insisting on their freedom to be racist. But it is more: They are insisting on their freedom to impose their racism on everyone else. They insist on their freedom to impose their hatred of women and fear of LGBTQ people on everyone else. They insist on their freedom to deny any legal rights to migrants to this country if those migrants aren’t white. When I say we are all relations, I am not trying to make nice with people who would deny others their humanity. Until people recognize the kinship of all people, they deny their own humanity.
