... and/or maleducation. It's also incredibly damaging to genuine human flourishing.
Because of my severe overlapping autoimmune conditions, I'm on high-dose immunosuppressive medications that leave me especially vulnerable to respiratory disease. MamaGeek, meanwhile, is stuck with a good chunk of nonfunctional lung tissue thanks to earlier infections and occasionally has to use supplemental oxygen to get through the day. We both, therefore, fall into that limited class of folks who actually are at significant risk for serious complications or death from COVID-19.
Weirdly, though, we've both remained incredibly Zen about this pandemic. Do we think it's nothing? No. We're taking precautions that we feel are commonsensical for our unique circumstances -- the same precautions, by the way, we take whenever any potentially nasty virus starts making the rounds. But we're simply not wracked with crippling anxiety over the Kung Flu -- and frankly, we find the over-the-top fear of our affluent suburban neighbors (or the young people on the trash reality TV shows MG watches nightly to relax) so profoundly bizarre that we can't quite wrap our heads around it. "You're healthy," we think. "More than 99% of you would get over this just fine if you came down with it. What the hell are you panicking about? Why are you screaming 'you're going to kill us!' at unmasked strangers? Why are you informing on your neighbors like good little Stasi puppets?"
Well, early this morning, the following thought suddenly occurred to me: maybe the reason why MG and I have managed to stay calm (and can consequently assimilate incoming information about COVID-19 in a balanced, skeptical fashion) is that we're not healthy. I've been dealing with chronic illness since my early twenties; MG is in the same boat. We've therefore been reminded our entire adult lives that the human body is a finite, fragile, imperfect thing that can fail on you at any time. And not to toot our own horns, but I think that experience has gifted us with a certain sort of wisdom that, for almost all of human history, was basically universal.
To put it simply: historically, virtually all people understood that sickness and death were unavoidable. That's because historically, virtually all people - regardless of socioeconomic status - encountered plenty of both throughout their lives. Only a century ago, for instance, nearly a fifth of the children born in the US failed to survive beyond age 5. That's a lot of parents tragically burying their offspring. And then there are people still alive today - like MG - who remember measles and whooping cough outbreaks in the days before widespread vaccination -- and remember how absolutely miserable they were. Is life catastrophe contaminated by malevolence, as Dr. Jordan Peterson frequently observes? Generations not far removed from the present would say yes -- for very good reason.
Until very recently, evidence of our inherent biological frailty stalked us all -- so we looked for meaning not in the mere preservation of our physical beings but in something else. We poured our hearts into building legacies -- mainly by building families and communities, but also by building businesses or creating art or diving into serious intellectual pursuits. And we realized that sometimes, those legacies mattered far more than living one more minute -- that staying alive at all costs was not always the correct choice because we were going to die eventually in any case.
Today, on the other hand, there are many extraordinarily fortunate people walking around who have not really had a significant brush with their own mortality - or with any of the other more terrible consequences of human embodiment - and have therefore deluded themselves into thinking they can conquer sickness and death through the force of their own wills. Throw a little sensationalist media coverage of COVID-19 their way, and yeah: hysteria results. The upshot? What MG and I have been boggling at all this time is a symptom of privilege. People who are well-off are more likely to fall to corona madness because they haven't really suffered and therefore have no means to put this one Chinese virus into perspective.
(A couple hundred thousand are believed to have died of COVID-19 if you believe the mainstream numbers. How many have died of heart disease in 2020 as of November? More than twice as many. How many have died of cancer? Also more than twice as many. Why the draconian public health measures for one but not for the others? Why are COVID-19 deaths being lifted above all other deaths in importance and official concern?)
Don't get me wrong: I think it's wonderful that in the past 100 years, we in the US have knocked child mortality down to less than 1%. I also think it's wonderful that our life expectancy has climbed to formerly unimaginable heights, that people are now surviving with illnesses that would've killed them decades ago, and that "premature" deaths are far, far less common than they once were. Modern medicine is a miracle; I certainly wouldn't want to dispense with it for the sake of teaching people wisdom. And luckily, I don't have to -- because no matter how advanced our science gets, it's highly unlikely that we will escape the wages of entropy entirely. If common bacteria can outsmart our most powerful antibiotics, it seems stupidly obvious to conclude that nature will always find a way to kick our arrogant asses at precisely the moment we think we've "won".
Yes: in the developed world, our lives are more comfortable and more healthy than they have ever been -- but that doesn't change fundamental realities. Life is still a terminal condition. The sooner we recognize that, the better off we will be -- because from where I sit, the 2020 status quo - in which our political and media elite are inducing what amounts to mass pathological OCD in half the populace - is completely destroying what makes life worth living to begin with. Re-read what I said about legacies above. That list, disturbingly, almost completely overlaps with the list of activities our leaders are seeking to ban (or at least severely curtail). And it's all for the sake of an idol -- a utopia in which COVID-19 kills no one else.
No: this impossible quest cannot continue. People need to spend time with their extended families. People need to have the freedom to provide for themselves through the work of their own hands. People need to assemble in worship communities and pray to God. We can't go on living in sanitized, climate-controlled bubbles as atomized, socially-distanced individuals. Asking this of your fellow citizens is inhumane.
I remarked in the beginning that both my mother and I are "at risk." Well, as a member of the "vulnerable" population, let me state here and now that I want the country to open up. I don't want people cowering in their homes on government assistance, victims of the soft tyranny of "if it saves just one life" . I've been taking responsibility for my own well-being for more than two decades now and certainly can continue to do so without calling down the force of the state as an ally.
And I suspect many people in my position would say the same.
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