COVID - Quarantine vs. 'Herd Immunity'

I am very aware of the toll that quarantine is taking on people, both financial and psychological.  One of my dearest friends has pretty much given her life over to babysitting her granddaughter every school day - attending virtual classes with her, as the child’s mother is in the other room being a virtual school counselor - to dozens of kids with special needs, who are also isolated at home with (or maybe without) parents distracted by other obligations.  This is taking a serious toll on Pam, and her relationships with her family.  So many kids don’t have a grandmother who can just drop everything to be a full-time nanny.  This can only be much tougher for them - and a serious setback to the children’s education.

We are ALL ready for this to be over.  I don’t compare my sacrifice to that of others, but I was supposed to be in Europe for two months this spring, taking the unstructured vacation I should have taken when I was nineteen.  I will not be hosting my family’s Thanksgiving dinner this year - which is the first time in almost a decade.  Since I live alone, and don’t see my family that often  that means a great deal to me each year - but so does the safety of my loved ones.  We also lost our brother this spring, and have not been able to gather to commemorate him.  Compared to what Pam, her daughter and grand-daughter, and your grand-children are facing, my story is inconsequential - but still worth sharing.  

Worldwide, this plague is taking a toll, both where restrictions are stric, as well as where they are lax.  In most of Europe, they imposed strict quarantine measures in the early spring, and held this disease at bay for months.  But isolation was exhausting for them, and they eased the restrictions, or people started violating them, and now their infection rate comes close to ours.  

My comment about mass murder wasn’t intended to suggest motivation.  But the reality is that large-scale infections and deaths are the inevitable result of loosening restrictions when there is no other way of limiting infection rates.  The concept of ‘herd-immunity’ is only humane when it is achieved through vaccination.  There is no way of truly isolating vulnerable populations as a deadly disease runs its course through the general population.  Because we don’t have a national approach to handling this, each state has run it as they choose.  The results speak for themselves.  

To complicate matters, this disease seems to be mutating in such a way that surviving it may only afford a person a brief period of partial immunity … which means that letting it run its course through the population would not result in herd immunity anyway.  It is to be hoped that researchers will develop a vaccine with broad enough effect that the immune response will be durable for a long period of time.  

Minority viewpoints DO need to be heard.  And the consequences of choices need to be weighed against one another, so the decision can be informed.  Unfortunately, a pandemic is not a place where each family should be allowed to decide for themselves how to approach it.  

I wish I had assurance that if we all just hunkered down for a few more months, this would go away … or, alternately, that if we just let it run its course, it would soon be over with.  The reality is that nobody knows … not you or me, not Anthony Fauci, and the majority of the world's epidemiologists, and not those who promote the Great Barrington Declaration.  

Profiles - Courage and Cowardice

 One of the most courageous things for a leader in a democracy to do is to take a necessary, but unpopular stand, and stick with it, despite tremendous pressure to change their mind.  John Kennedy’s book, Profiles in Courage is a collection of stories of US Senators who took such stands, knowing it could (and generally did) cost them their jobs.  

Career-limiting decisions like these are courageous under the best of circumstances.  How much more courageous to stick to such a decision in a broken society, where gangs of armed dead-enders form up into ersatz militias, and form plans to violently overthrow authorities who make decisions with which they disagree.  

One thing such leaders can typically count on in our country is the support of law enforcement, and the federal government.  How vastly more courageous it must be for a governor to sustain a necessary, but unpopular decision when the local sheriff sides with the anti-government vigilantes - and even the president tweets dog-whistle endorsement for their criminal plotters.  

A profile in courage stands out most boldly within a milieu of cowardice.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/08/politics/gretchen-whitmer-kidnapping-plot-cnntv/index.html

1940 Crises and Election

 At times like this, when so much history is being made (for better or worse), it is sometimes hard to step back and look a little further back in history. 

Eighty years ago, there was an important election in the US.  The world was in the midst of a major crisis, that showed all the signs of getting much worse before it got better.  Totalitarian, violent regimes on opposite sides of the globe were running rampant.  Imperial Japan had brought war and devastation to large parts of China and Southeast Asia.  In Europe, Nazi Germany had defeated France, and was preparing to invade Great Britain.  The Battle of Britain, fought in the skies over southern England and London foiled that plan, but left Germany in command of most of continental western Europe.  

Within this environment, Franklin Roosevelt was running for an unprecedented third term in office.  Both he and his opponent, Wendell Wilke, knew that the US would be drawn into the war, but neither dared to be the first to acknowledge that to an isolationist electorate.  They had sort of a ‘gentleman’s agreement’ to not make that part of the election.  

The crisis revealed an ugly side of many prominent Americans.  Charles Lindberg and Henry Ford were prominent voices for staying out … motivated in part by their virulent anti-semitism.  Joseph Kennedy, our ambassador to Great Britain, joined their isolationist cause, if only because he felt that Hitler had already won, and we needed to just accept it as a fait accompli.  

I highly recommend Susan Dunn’s book, ‘1940’, for a deep dive on these crises, and this election.  It really does help to try on the lens that a view of history provides. 

Public Option and Competition

I'm a little bit confused by the opposition to a public option to the for-profit health-care choices that dominate our system.  On the one hand people are concerned that these programs will be a drain on public resources.  Then, without missing a beat, we are told that such a program ... even one without public subsidies, would present unfair competition to insurance companies. 

In general, most people leveling these criticisms believe them.   honestly intended, but inconsistent.  I mean, either the system is so inefficient that we can't afford to offer it, or it's so efficient that it is unfair competition to 'for-profit' competitors. 

The reality is that it is neither. 

Little Sisters and Birth Control

… and if your manager is a nun, you don’t even need to bother asking. 

In a way I don’t blame the Little Sisters of the Poor for their objections.  It makes sense because we pose the wrong question in this country.  Even with the Affordable Care Act (ACA, or ‘ObamaCare’), the procurement and administration of health insurance is still left to employers, who peruse the details of costs and coverage.  This is a vestige of the ancient ‘patron’ theory of employment—which enabled broad invasions of employee privacy—most aspects of which have been relegated to the dustbin of history.

Health insurance is a human right, and the minimum basic coverage required under the ACA is bare bones.  It is much better to view paying for the coverage as part of the cost of employing people, while leaving the selection and administration to professionals.  That administration is time-consuming and costly for small employers; it is terribly inefficient for, say, a restauranteur to be expected to gain enough expertise (not to mention power) to negotiate with a huge insurance company.  No other advanced industrial country burdens employers with this; we shouldn’t either.

It would be much more efficient and affordable to establish a single risk pool, called ‘human being’, and negotiate rates for minimum basic coverage en masse.  For those employed, the employer’s role would simply be to contribute the appropriate amount into a fund to cover their obligation – much as is done with Social Security and Medicare.  It is not an employer’s business to look into the details of a human being’s healthcare coverage, any more than a range of other personal choices they make. 

I understand the Little Sisters balking at having to specifically procure health insurance coverage that contains clauses they find immoral.  This should not be in their hands; they should not be customizing coverage – any more than an employer who is a Christian Scientist might customize coverage that covers only prayer. 

Modern Propaganda

“The point of modern propaganda isn't only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.”
  - Garry Kasparov

We are inundated with an amazing torrent of misinformation.  I had naïvely hoped that the global pandemic we face might have encouraged at least some of the purveyors to take a break, or tone it down a bit.  But, to the contrary, they have ramped up the nonsense, and the sources have proliferated.  

Manipulators easily find wedges, and offer easy answers to those confused by the complexity of the real problems we face.  Otherwise intelligent people are overwhelmed by it all, and give up their filters.  The timeless siren song of the deceiver, ‘You can’t trust anybody … so trust me!’ echoes throughout the canyons of our society, emerging from the depths of the dark web.  And we products of the sixties and seventies, trained to be skeptical of authority, are easy prey for those who claim that their voices have been silenced by a cynical establishment.

There is an entire ecosystem of fraud.  Much of it is not even internally consistent, but once somebody has been captured within its web, they no longer expend the effort to connect the dots; they just believe.  And because distrust of outside influences is integral to the program, it is extremely difficult to correct the record from outside the bubble.  

We who exist outside the bubble face the difficult decision to either listen dispassionately, as people repeat these paranoid fantasies, or offer corrections and clarification - tearing friendships apart, and promoting the very social discord and disunity the deceivers seek.   

I, for one, am utterly exhausted, depressed, and totally pessimistic about the potential victory of truth over ‘alternative facts’; of serious peer-reviewed science over ‘maverick’ nut-cases; of evidence and statistics over well-coached gut feel, denial, and cognitive dissonance.  

Mechanisms of Cults

Observing the workings of a cult is an excellent study in human psychology and sociology.  If you don’t know what to look for, you can miss it as it takes root and grow in your midst.  

Cult leaders rarely start right out with the ‘big lie’.  Even the most gullible of potential members would laugh in their face and move on if they did.  Rather, they lay the groundwork over time; exploiting their followers’ alienation from the modern world – or fear of changes in society.  They begin with smaller, more ambiguous fabrications that gradually draw followers in. 

As leaders strengthen their hold, they isolate followers from outside influence.  This may be overt—prohibiting members from contacting families, reading newspapers, watching television, or listening to the radio—but is more likely subtle.  It is equally effective to consistently ridicule outside sources of information, encouraging members to cut themselves off.  Over time, these sources are less frequently brought into conversation – unless distorted for use as a straw-dog, to reinforce the cult’s orthodoxy.  Outside news sources are ridiculed as the ‘liberal press’, ‘mainstream’ media, ‘drive-by’, or ‘lame-stream’ media.  Peer pressure and embarrassment cause members, over time, to avoid these altogether.  Those who stray from this prohibition are viewed with suspicion by their fellow members. Rather than risk alienation from the group, the transgressor mends his or her ways, and avoids connection with these threatening influences. 

The true test comes when the cult leader tells members something that is clearly, verifiably, false … then asserts it repeatedly.  If the hook is set, followers will come around to believing the leader, rather than their own eyes.  A guru may claim he is flying, thought he is clearly just sitting still in the lotus position – or that he is bench-pressing some ridiculously high weight, when a system of pulleys is clearly visible.  Or a leader might claim to have attracted the largest crowd in history to his inauguration, when photographic evidence clearly shows a sparse crowd.  So, who are you going to believe; your eyes, or the object of your adoration?  

Once this point is reached, credulous True Believers can be led to believe almost anything, and followers become, in essence, an extension of the leader.  Outsiders lose all influence; their silence is perceived as assent; disagreement, if heard at all, is perceived as a threat.  Cognitive dissonance—the fear that if one admits the error of one claim, it could weaken of destroy one’s entire perceptual framework—creates a curtain of denial.  The more ridiculous the lie that comes to light, the more intense is this effect.  Rather than causing followers to question their beliefs or their fealty to the leader, a clear falsehood makes them cling ever more tightly. 

Those who help cultists escape the hold of their leaders have a daunting task under the best of circumstances.  Escaping members they must be shielded from cult influences in order to reenter normal reality – and even so, it takes a long time, and leaves the former member disoriented and unmoored.  When a cult has multiple, easily accessible channels of mass media, and controls all branches of a nation’s government, the prospects for members to escape are dismal.