I’m almost ready to give up.
The world has gone completely insane, as you may have noticed. Now I wonder whether I was already there. What I don’t wonder, however, is whether I should care. Because I don’t. Not anymore.
For years I have mostly kept my political leanings off Prose Poetry Code, because I felt it just wasn’t the place. Yes, I did the “Social Liberty” thing a long time ago, but that was about it. Even those posts never actually advocated a particular ideology; they were nothing more than a thought experiment where I tried to derive the inalienable rights of the Constitution from a set of first principles.
Well, what I’ve learned lately is that nothing in the modern world is apolitical. And so PPC can’t be, either. At this point, I believe I have nothing left to lose by throwing my opinion up here. What’s going to happen? I’ll lose my job? Nope. Don’t have one, and I doubt I’ll be getting one in the near future, despite my best efforts. Put on a watchlist? Already there, most likely. My girlfriend will leave me? That presumes I would have a chance of keeping her otherwise, and that assumption is hanging on by the thinnest of threads.
In other words, I’m already a broken man. This can’t break me any more than I already am, so why bother keeping my opinions bottled up?
Panic
Let’s start with the only news story we’ve had for the past month: coronavirus. No, I’m not one of those people who think it’s a hoax, a conspiracy to cover up the “real” truth of 5G towers and chemtrails and whatever else the Alex Jones types have come up with. It’s a real virus that’s affecting real people.
That most emphatically does not mean it’s all the media has made it out to be. Slowly but surely, solid numbers are coming out, and they very often show just how overblown the danger is. Asymptomatic rates of 20-50%, if not higher. Antibody presence in 15% or more of a random sample. An actual fatality rate closer to 0.3% than the 2-7% we were initially told.
And it doesn’t take much looking (though you do have to go off the beaten path of mainstream media and celebrity Twitter feeds) to find reports from everywhere in the US—with the notable exceptions of the New York and Detroit metro areas—of half-empty hospitals, of doctors and nurses being laid off or furloughed, of a growing realization that this was not the apocalyptic disease we were told to expect. The “best” model, the IHME model from the University of Washington, overshot Tennessee’s cases by a factor of 20! Minnesota’s special snowflake model is calling for a 30,000% increase in coronavirus deaths (from approximately 70 to over 20,000) between now and the end of summer!
Supporters of the draconian measures we have endured will say that those worst-case scenarios are if we don’t lock everything down, lock everyone up. But that’s simply not true. The IHME model takes into account “social distancing” measures (and that phrase disgusts me on many levels, but I digress) as of April 1, though its cheerleaders don’t seem to notice or care.
Pandemic
The problem, as ever, is polarization. If anything, I consider that far more of a threat to our nation than any virus, because it’s a much more insidious disease. Even today, you can take a look anywhere, whether online or real life, and see America increasingly divided into two camps that seem to be inhabiting two different realities.
On the left, you hear cries to keep the lockdowns until there are no more coronavirus deaths. Which is unrealistic, even if you discount the fact that hospitals are overcounting those deaths in an attempt to make back some of the money they’re losing by postponing elective surgeries. Add in the very real possibility that a vaccine might be years away (assuming it’s even possible—we don’t have one for the common cold, and that’s sometimes caused by a coronavirus), and…what’s the plan? We become the Morlocks, never seeing the sun except when we brave it to scrounge for a meal?
Every day you extend what we can only call the imprisonment of millions of Americans only makes the situation worse. Mental health is declining sharply—my own included. Suicides are rising, and I have no doubt that they will outnumber legitimate coronavirus deaths by the end of this year; whether I’m included in that tally is, I’ll be honest, an open question. For those fortunate enough to have families, they’re seeing increased incidence of domestic violence, child abuse, and other nastiness. Those are sure to take yet more lives. And that’s not even counting the lives that may never be, thanks to this isolation.
But the right isn’t any better, because they can only look at things through one lens: economy. Yes, it’s bad, and getting worse. Small businesses are failing, and big business is no longer booming. Unemployment is off the charts. Literally, as in the charts, much like the unemployment applications, were never made to handle such a vast segment of the workforce applying for benefits at the same time. Yet those wounds can be healed in time. We recovered from the Great Depression. We recovered from the Spanish Flu. Both of those were far more damaging, whether to our economy or our populace, than this virus.
Focusing on the economy, however, minimizes the impacts the lockdowns are having in other areas. Humans are social animals, and we evolved to socialize in person. Face to face, not through a computer or phone screen. Technology is wonderful. It’s the mark of progress, the symbol of all we have achieved. But it can’t replace the real world yet. To say that Zoom or FaceTime or Duo can substitute for actually being in the same room as a loved one, for actually having the chance to hold your newborn nephew, for actually doing the things you enjoy doing, is laughable. To say it’s more important to reopen the barbershop down the street is dehumanizing. It makes us nothing more than cogs in a machine.
Pan-democratic
We are more than that. We are human. And, as Jefferson wrote, all humans are endowed with certain inalienable rights, chief among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Nothing in the Constitution says those rights are invalid in a time of crisis, because the very idea that we should protect them, enshrine them, rose from a time of crisis.
If police can stop a peaceful protest because the protestors are standing too close together, then why even have a right to assemble? If it takes federal intervention to stop a state from scanning the license plates of cars sitting in a church parking lot on Easter Sunday, how is that free exercise of religion?
The greatest thing about the Bill of Rights, I have long felt, is its purpose. Jefferson, Madison, and the other Founding Fathers did not create a document that said the government granted these rights. Not at all. Instead, they made a list of the most important rights that we have just by being born, then said, “Let’s make sure these can’t be taken away.” The First Amendment starts with the words “Congress shall make no law…” because the writers knew that Congress would eventually try to make those laws. (In fact, they barely had to wait: the Alien and Sedition Acts came about during John Adams’ presidency!) All through the Bill of Rights, you can see that this is not a list of what the people can do, but what the government can’t.
Yet they are. And in a much more dangerous fashion than in the dark days after 9/11, the days of the Patriot Act, of “extraordinary rendition” and the TSA and a hundred other small cuts. Now, it’s easier to point out the amendments still intact, because they number one: the Third. And I’d wager that’s only because state governors haven’t found a way to put the National Guard in peoples’ homes to make sure they stay far enough apart.
We can change this. We can end the tyranny if we all work together, if we cast aside our petty tribalism. Forget about Team Red versus Team Blue. Think about Team Red, White, and Blue. Stand up to those seeking ever more power over your life, your livelihood, the things you hold dear, the things that make you who you are.
We have an election in November. I had intended to run for the office of state representative, but the coronavirus stopped that. I couldn’t go from door to door for petition signatures to get on the ballot. But I still have a voice and a vote. Anyone, regardless of party affiliation, who supports a continued lockdown based on faulty data, media hysteria, and wishful thinking will receive no help from me. Those who wish to deny me freedom are my enemies. It’s as simple as that.
I may be broken, but maybe I can help others put their pieces back together.