Journal of the plague year 2: For afterwards

Back in March the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, referred briefly to why London had only 800 ICU beds when this crisis started, though it would need 8,000. But, he said, “That’s for afterwards.” Meaning, there are going to be important questions to answer about various localities’ preparedness for this pandemic, but right now, he was interested not so much in why we only had 800 beds as how we were going to get thousands.

       I think that is a good focus to have. As we—not just one nation, but the world—try to get through this pandemic together, I don’t think we need anything that is going to unnecessarily ratchet up anxiety levels or divisions. But I’m spending a lot of time thinking about what we can learn “for afterwards.” 

       Not who did what wrong. That, I believe, is simply not something we can know with any accuracy until the present crisis is over, or perhaps for years. Besides, it’s not helpful (see anxiety, above). There surely are lessons to learn, but in this time, I don’t believe anyone should be wasting energy pointing the finger of blame, that could be used to help. 

As the character Bea writes to her husband in Michael Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things: “Someone at work said to me this morning, ‘Where is God in all this?’ I didn’t rise to the bait. I can never understand why people ask that question. The real question for the bystanders of tragedy is ‘Where are WE in all this?’”

What is helping me, and may possibly help you, is to think about what we can appreciate during this time, and ways we might take that into a better future for everybody.

Here’s one: Resist the temptation to go back to the old ways, whether those are assumptions about how our economic system has to work, or easy labeling of right and left. It was Newt Gingrich, of all people, who pointed out early in the crisis that there are tens of thousands of homeless people on the streets of U.S. cities, and what if they get sick? They can’t self-isolate, whether to protect themselves or protect others. But this also shows that we have underlying conditions of the health of our society. There should never be tens of thousands of homeless people. I know the causes of homelessness are complex, and perhaps it will never be completely solved. But that doesn’t mean we should go back to tolerating it. Not taking care of homeless people will not only cost their lives, but other people’s lives. We simply can not afford to let this go on.

We need to think about whether we are prepared to go on being the type of society we are. Many people probably were not previously aware of the now thrown-around fact, that many American and British children from low-income families depend on schools just to eat. There should never be kids who will go hungry if they don’t go to school. 

You don’t have to be a democratic socialist to wonder: Why are half of Americans living from paycheck to paycheck? We might prefer smaller government, but without massive government intervention in the present, what do we expect those people to do? Conservatives know this as well. It's a Conservative government in Britain, and a Republican-dominated one in the U.S., that have shelled out a bunch of money for people. Already some are speculating that this may be used in the future as a way to buy electoral loyalty, but that doesn’t change the fact that huge government spending is what was needed. Right at that moment.

Besides nursing homes, where alarming death rates are unfolding in Britain and other countries, many severe outbreaks in the U.S. are taking place in prisons and meatpacking plants. The former should be no surprise; the more people are close together, the higher the rates of infection, and at the risk of sounding like a Bernie Sanders stump speech, the U.S. incarcerates more of its population than any country except communist China. It’s beyond the scope of this article to sort out the country’s punitive culture, but unless we are to imagine that Americans are, as a people, far more wicked than others, these percentages make about as much sense as the levels of gun violence. 

As for the latter, so extensive that the nation’s meat supply has been affected, the U.S. consumes more meat per capita than any country on earth. I’m no more a militant vegetarian than I am a criminal justice expert. All I am asking is: Can’t we do better?

"Crises have a way of exposing inequalities that linger uncomfortably below the surface when times are good."

In our thanks for the heroism of everyone who stepped up to help, we should remember that it is criminal that health care workers, in the most expensive system in the world, had to depend on friends or strangers sewing them homemade fabric masks. The failure to implement guidelines on personal protective equipment sooner, as soon as the evidence was there, cost lives; I know, and I’m sure you know, of examples personally.

In our thanks for the heroism of workers who risk their lives, we should no longer tolerate a United States of America where GoFundMe is where ordinary people go to raise money for their medical bills. Middle-class people, never mind the poorest. Call it Medicare, call it Obamacare or whatever you want to, but we can no longer tolerate a system where working people are afraid to go to the doctor lest they be bankrupted—or deported. It’s not just their emergency anymore. It was everybody’s emergency, and we could have done so much better.

Other things we may end up questioning:

·      The brilliance of “just in time” supply chains to retail. Of having everything manufactured in China so we can have “everyday low prices.” Now, we are suffering from the “Chinese virus,” only to find that vital parts for the very supplies that will help fight that virus must come from—China. And Russia, and other countries we would rather not be dependent on. The Defense Production Act, recently invoked by the U.S. administration, is a good start, but the U.S. is not the manufacturing powerhouse it was in the Korean war era. We need other countries, whether we like it or not.

“For years, it was cheaper to manufacture those key ingredients overseas and keep just enough of the product on hand." 

"Nobody had stockpiles."

 “We need to be willing to pay a little more during times of peace without crisis so we have supply available during crisis.”

Brendan Carr, chair of emergency medicine at Mount Sinai Health System in New York: “You can’t have extra capacity and efficiency at the same time,” he said. “In fact, for years, we’ve called that waste.”

These problems are not, of course, confined to America. Anders Melander, an analyst with the Swedish Defense Research agency, said, “We expected with the free market we would always be able to purchase what we needed," according to The New York Times.

“It’s not really a great plan,” Mr. Melander noted. “It’s like saying: ‘I don’t have to have a fire extinguisher. I can run out and buy a fire extinguisher when the fire starts.’ It shows that this free market is only free when everything is fine.”

·      The “gig economy.” People earning their living by driving Ubers or hopping on their mopeds to deliver takeout. It all sounded so flexible and futuristic in Economist articles, but now, those workers are forced to choose between following public health advice (social distancing, not working if they or their families are symptomatic) and feeding their families. The only thing that can free them from this dilemma is massive government spending. Conservative politicians who have spent their entire careers telling us that the state should be as small as possible and the market will figure everything out are finding that the government is the only thing that can move big enough, fast enough, to make a difference when lives are on the line.

This is going to show us, in any society, what kind of society we are. It is going to show the fault lines. Europeans would be shocked to discover that in the U.S., your water can be turned off if you don’t pay a bill. This happened to 1.5 million Americans last year. How are those people supposed to wash their hands? That’s not just their problem anymore—it’s everybody’s. If we care about ourselves and our families, we need to care about others.

Free enterprise is a great way to run an economy, but we can no longer kid ourselves that businesses are, or should be, independent of the wider public interest. They’re the first to run to government for a bailout. As for a corporate entity being allowed to trump the individual citizen, as one wag observed, “I’ll believe a corporation is a person when Texas executes one.”

Nonetheless, we don’t really want the airlines to go bust. Many of us rely on air travel, at least in part, to visit relatives and friends who are spread across the globe. But that is a privilege, and we should ask whether we want to go back to artificially cheap holiday flights, or something approaching the real cost of flying, to the planet as a whole. 

I reiterate: This is not just a matter of left-leaning solutions that some of us were already inclined to anyway. There are many differences between Germany under Chancellor Angela Merkel and other countries with other political leaders. Surely the most important difference, unforgettable now, is not Merkel’s ideology (she’s conservative) but the remarkably low rate of deaths in Germany, which has had highly organized testing at an incredibly high level compared with almost any other nation. Trust in Merkel’s leadership and her calm, clear communication has also played a role. In easier times, politics is an interest or a sideshow, depending on whether it has consequences for us personally. Suddenly, now, it matters to everybody who is in charge of the government. Every day that passes is a matter of life and death.

Here is another example. This emergency has required unprecedented measures, some of which unquestionably restrict our civil liberties. Some concerns have been raised about this, typically coming from people who lean conservative, while others, who lean in the other direction, point out that it is an emergency and we simply have to take these measures now. But the concerns aren’t unfounded. They are just coming from the opposite direction from in 2001, when, in response to September 11, Americans’ civil liberties were restricted by the Patriot Act. Then, people who leaned left were concerned that there weren’t enough safeguards, or timed reviews, built into the restrictions, and so they would never be taken away.

We were right. The Patriot Act is still with us. It is not only possible, but right, to be both concerned about taking the right emergency measures and not giving away powers to government that it tends not to give back. It is perhaps not well remembered now that during the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, many gay activists strongly resisted the closing of the bathhouses as a public health measure. They feared that gay people would be targeted and punished. The public health imperative prevailed, but the fears were real, in a country where homosexuality was reviled and largely criminalized.

Yet this crisis is also showing that pointing fingers to the usual suspects is no more helpful from the left than from the right. Big banks are justifiably blamed for their screw-ups in the 2008 financial crisis, but now, without the banks’ help, small businesses and those who work for them will be in trouble. Without the help of pharmaceutical companies, life-saving research and development won’t happen.

One of the most breathtaking aspects of the U.S. economic discussion has been the complete taking for granted that a whole swath of the the economy, without which so many double incomes could not be made, is outside legality. “One family laid off its nanny but wondered if she would video chat with the children for free.”

I don't blame the workers in this situation, who are only some of those breaking immigration law. I blame employers who were only too happy to exploit the black market when times were good, but the moment trouble happened, dropped their workers as if they were not even human beings. This system is not sustainable, and it is not right.

Everyone knows the immigration system is broken, but bipartisan efforts to sort it out have failed, because of ideological intransigence. On the right, immigrants and all things foreign make targets for nationalism, while on the left, there seems to be an incapability of recognizing that there’s such a thing as illegal immigration at all. Meanwhile what’s broken is also systematic: an entire chunk of the economy, tolerated if not indispensable, that is as much about illegal employment as it is about the employees.

Globalization, this neoliberal reality we have all been laboring under since the late 1970s, is all so clever when it works. But we are learning that this new globalized economy is as vulnerable as its most authoritarian government and its most lax environmental laws. And we are also learning how interdependent we are for good. In an app-based, increasingly isolating world, we find that there is no substitute for human contact, after all.

When we go back, or rather forward, into whatever the new “normal” will be, I wonder if permanent alterations in behavior will result. For example, when eventually people return to bars and restaurants and in-person get-togethers, will they appreciate that being able to see and even touch another person is a different experience from talking via a screen? Or will they, even while present with another person, revert to phoning someone else?

I see I have written a highly critical post. But as ever, it’s not all bad news. Our neighbors’ gardens (backyards) are getting more use than they have in a while: gardening, laundry on the line, and on the other side, a daddy playing football with his little girl.

Faith, hope, and love are not canceled. Faith in others to do the right thing. Hope that we can learn from this and continue to do better. Love for each other and this precious world.