I Guess We’re Not All In This Together
It did not take me long to adopt and liberally use the pom-pom waving phrase, “We’re all in this together!” as the societal effects of Covid began to take hold. Honestly, it was a very natural usage seeing how, as a functioning member of society and completely privileged white male, it came from the heart. My working theory is that I am just old enough to believe in the concept of Americans as a unit, pulling together when times get tough, contrary to all available historical data. Perhaps it was seeded in me by the depression area stories of my father and grandparents or the jingoistic war movies I consumed in my youth. But I swear I saw it with my own eyes as well. When President Reagan was shot, the Challenger disaster, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the 9/11 terror attacks and, of course, Avengers: Endgame. Then again, I have seen Waterworld AND The Postman and apparently gleaned no lessons that societal breakdown in deep crisis is an absolute given, led by angry white men whose STRENGTH and CRUELTY give them the Sun-God like power to rule. That and they have all the guns. And as it turns out, all the toilet paper too. Sadly, this last aspect did not make it into the final cut of either movie.
Sidebar: I am told that if I had watched Walking Dead, I would have been properly emotionally prepared for the rapidly developing survival of the fittest shenanigans.
Honestly, I marvel at my own squishy, naïve, dare I say Liberal, notion that in the face of a global pandemic against a virus with no human immunity that spreads easily and is seemingly not killed by heat, cold, natural light, UV light, time outside the body or “I really mean it this time” level scolding, Americans would band together, hunker down and do what was needed to get us through until a vaccine. Sure, I was prepared for a little panic buying and frankly, I could have left some of the organic basil pesto on the shelf (I am telling you now, a little dab on your robin’s egg omelet will send your taste buds to the moon) but I was unprepared for scenes like this:
Even then, my rampant humanism thought, “He probably has terrible Crohn’s Disease and needs a 3-year supply to reduce his anxiety. Then again, I don’t really know Crohn’s Disease. Maybe this is the normal weekly run.” Yes, I assigned this behavior to a male, but honestly, this could be considered hunting or gathering, so if you want to use early homosapien gender roles, it could be a woman as well. Either way, you must admit, this is A+ hunting. Or gathering. I will risk cancellation by stating I feel that a genderfluid person would not pull this stunt. Not that they couldn’t of course.
But I digress.
Between March 15 and April 15, 2020 more than 30,000 Americans died from getting sick. Not cancer or diabetes or heart disease, things that happen a lot but not from touching a doorknob or talking to Conrad outside the imported cheese shop. Le fromage ètait ma perte… A runaway train of a virus, was ripping through the country and there was absolutely nothing to be done about it except, staying away from people. No vaccines, no treatments, modern medicine had jack to offer you if you got sick except if it was bad enough, there were machines to pump air into your wretched body and keep some of your other organs working. A moment of honesty, Americans are not used to medicine drawing a blank for anything that might go wrong with our bodies. Our society even advertises medicines and cajoles people to “talk to your doctor” the way you might check in with the sommelier about new vintages every couple of weeks, am I right?
Needless-to-say, most people take the advice to do the only thing there is to do right now and that is stay home and watch TV. After all, we are all in this together! A solid month or six-weeks to stop the spread dead in its tracks, give the healthcare system time to prepare, develop a strong federal response plan to a nationwide crisis, we can do this people! We are Americans! We are all in this…Together!
And it almost, kinda, sorta, maybe looked like that is what was going to happen. The toilet paper thing was a downer but hey, give people a break. We’re a civilized society that demands to Enjoy the Go (copyright, Charmin, red cartoon bears, on my TV). But then, well, there are many other articles on Medium chronicling the federal response or lack thereof. America’s holy mother, the stock market, took one quick look and immediately cratered, which is another way of saying the wealthy took their ten years of triple digit gains and retired to their compounds and waited for their bailout which would be the signal they could buy in low once again.
As everyone stayed home, the economy cratered, natch. It took two weeks, two weeks for a significant chunk of Americans to lose their minds because the guvm’nt told them what to do. These fine people filled themselves with rage that they would be asked to help save the lives of their fellow Americans. Some very suspicious money helped organize demonstrations against governors because just too much was being asked of them. How dare they be asked to give up their FREEEEEDOOOOMMM simply to save old people? Interesting how these protests showed up in election battleground states, yes? This now famous picture captures it.
In the next beat of what is beginning to seem like a well organized song, individuals on television drone at length about the cure being worse than the disease, that 2–3% fatalities are acceptable, that damn it, America has just got to get back to work, consequences be damned. And I sit trying to absorb this horror and then it hits me. I am the naïve one. I am the silly-billy who thought we were all in this together. Stupid. Our country’s very DNA is independence and individualism which is advantageous when you are building a nation, lethal when trying to contain a pathogen in a modern society. Somewhere along the way, our rugged individualism was hijacked by a cultural pathogen tracing back to the Civil War. It reflexively attacks the need for monolithic behavior in a highly diverse population. My confession: I did not see this coming. I thought the ace-in-the-hole was that we could set aside our differences under the bright banner of AMERICA when the times demanded it.
But that is not what we have become. Maybe we never were. I guess we’re not in this together.
