This is a time of great confusion. The media is reminding us constantly to fear coronavirus. Some are casting coronavirus as a wartime enemy. How many people will this enemy kill in the US? According to Dr. Anthony Fauci, 100,000-240,000 people. That is a large number, and a strange one given the absence of any rationale for how it was obtained. Nonetheless, this number is significantly smaller than the 250,000-440,000 people who die due to medical error in this county every year. So, to be clear, the medical system itself is far more deadly than our country's top doctor's estimates about coronavirus.
In this new "war" we have entered, many politicians are predictably advancing agendas to increase their power and transfer public resources into private hands. This is what they did after 9/11. And it's what they're doing now. The main difference between then and now is that now, the power grabs are bigger, because a "war" on a virus can be used to justify far more intrusive behavioral controls than a war on terror ever could.
The media, for its part, looks to me to be pushing a very controlled agenda. Fear the virus. Trust the medical community to accurately estimate infection rates despite low quality data. Trust the government to provide adequate disaster relief to the tens of millions of people whose lives have been upended by this thing. And get ready for many months of living in a country where public life simply does not exist.
More than the virus, the political power grab that's beginning combined with this media narrative scares the hell out of me.
Don't get me wrong. I'm all for six weeks of social distancing to bend the curve and buy our medical system time to get its shit together. But if society as a whole turns into the kind of place where people call the cops on their neighbors for having a party and no one can move freely without some kind of medical certificate, that's a problem. And if our Constitutionally-protected rights stop being protected by our government, then it's time for a revolution.
Sadly, responses to this pandemic are beginning to cleave along partisan lines. The right vies for a return to business as usual ASAP. The left favors increasingly authoritarian controls placed on our persons indefinitely. Neither side makes sense. So maybe it's time to start organizing a third side that does make sense.
