Now that the Trump administration has declared the COVID–19 virus a national emergency, it is plain that this once-a-century catastrophe has some things to tell us about ourselves. A thousand New Age apostles call for unity in 1960s “get together” style. In the Hallmark card category, Marianne Williamson advised us on Twitter Saturday, “We can grow from this.”
We may or may not grow from this. This will depend on whether we identify the lessons the COVID–19 pandemic has for humanity — and then go on to learn from them such that we can effect change in the way we live and organize ourselves. Certain nations — agile, imaginative, confident — prove capable of change in the face of new circumstances. The U.S. is not one of these, to put the point politely.
The numerous urgings to unite ourselves reek of what the French call angélisme —hopeless, impotent idealism. These expressions reflect back on us like mirrors, and what they show us is bitter: We preach unity because we have little of it to work with as a nation. Our communities are in one degree or another shredded. The invocation of “we,” indeed, is highly questionable.
Three factors leave us in this fragile, more or less helpless state. There is the radical individualism arising from the Anglo–American philosophic tradition. This causes us to neglect and abuse public space with perfect indifference. We are left, in turn, at the mercy of market fundamentalism. “Savage capitalism,” as this is known in Latin America, is diabolically merciless, as too many of us know firsthand.
President Donald Trump’s press conference Friday, when he announced the state of emergency, was a remarkable occasion — another mirror bearing another lesson. Trump stood shoulder-to-shoulder with a flock of CEOs the White House recruited to counter the spread of COVID–19. WalMart will get this done. Google will get this done. Roche, the drug maker, stood in for Big Pharma: They will all help, too. It is a spectacle to watch the powerful speak thus above our heads. Is this what community in America comes to now? Are we to accept that community has been effectively corporatized along with everything else in American life that isn’t nailed down (and many things that are)?
Put Trump’s appearance Friday next to simultaneous press reports describing the alarming decrepitude of local and state health departments, and the lesson is complete. “Many health departments are suffering from budget and staffing cuts that date to the Great Recession and have never been fully restored,” The New York Times observes.
Actually, the story of our starved-out health departments begins in the Reagan era, when the federal government got smaller by shoving various responsibilities onto states and localities without funding these transferred responsibilities. In the face of crisis, we are caught by our own carelessness — decades of it — as safety nets were ripped up and the commons robbed before our eyes.
Kurgen
Article URL : https://consortiumnews.com/2020/03/16/patrick-lawrence-the-us-national-emergency/