As I sit here on an Easter Sunday, church pews are empty and everything that was once done in person is now turned digital, lacking the human interaction we need to develop social skills.
Human society has always been subject to major epidemics and has dealt with them in quite similar ways over the centuries, even over the millennia. Of course, human society itself has also changed the way in which epidemics work. William H. McNeill, the great world historian, wrote a book called “Plagues and Peoples,” where he made a powerful argument for the impact of plagues upon human society. Take the Black Death, for example, in 1349, which killed maybe half the population in Europe. The economic effects were absolutely profound, when you think of the labor shortage, for example—too few people to work the fields—and the change in social relations and social structures.
There are certain events that open like a flash of lightning across a landscape. They make you see all kinds of things that you wouldn’t otherwise see. Today we can see the top-down authoritarian leadership extending their reach and infringing on civil liberty and freedom.
If we look at the SARS outbreak in China back in 2002, just around the time that the government passed from the hands of Jiang Zemin to Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao. In both that SARS case and the current outbreak of COVID-19, information was concealed at the initial stage of the outbreak. Even though the spread of SARS was becoming rampant in Guangdong Province, precise information was not relayed from the local authorities to Beijing, and eventually, the virus also spread to the capital, creating a serious situation.
The very government that was supposed to protect the people was lying or omitting information. Can we blame communism? Or is it more like all governments that are corrupt in a lot of manners that close the door to the very hallway of protection the people thought they would receive?
By the time Donald Trump proclaimed himself a wartime president — and the coronavirus the enemy — the United States was already on course to see more of its people die than in the wars of Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq combined.
The country has adopted an array of wartime measures never employed collectively in U.S. history — banning incoming travelers from two continents, bringing commerce to a near-halt, enlisting industry to make emergency medical gear, and confining 230 million Americans to their homes in a desperate bid to survive an attack by an unseen adversary.
Is freedom not that important when safety is expected among a population that can in fact protect themselves?
In the United States, if you believe the governments account on 9/11 (I don't, but it's a great example), The failure has echoes of the period leading up to 9/11: Warnings were sounded, including at the highest levels of government, but the president was deaf to them until the enemy had already struck.
Not only can they not protect us but more often they choose to opt-out.
The patriot act was signed and more freedom was ratified, reflecting the lack thereof. The end result was staggering to the very people asking for protection. They continue today to do things like warrantless wiretapping.
What makes everyone so sure that after this pandemic is over and done with the authoritarian control enacted this time will dissipate?
The Trump administration received its first formal notification of the outbreak of the coronavirus in China on Jan. 3. Within days, U.S. spy agencies were signaling the seriousness of the threat to Trump by including a warning about the coronavirus — the first of many — in the President’s Daily Brief.
And yet, it took 70 days from that initial notification for Trump to treat the coronavirus not as a distant threat or harmless flu strain well under control, but as a lethal force that had outflanked America’s defenses and was poised to kill tens of thousands of citizens. That more-than-two-month stretch now stands as a critical time that was squandered.
Maybe the point wasn't to alert the people and have a scenario of utter readiness. Perhaps the plan was and still is, to allow something that causes so much fear that the people just adapt to the top-down government rule enacted, rather than questioning it.
The people now are not just accepting what I know as tyranny and lack of freedom, They are begging for it.
Begging the government for their protection only hurts others that actually care about freedom. Protect yourself and begin learning how to think for yourself. If we do not, we might as well plan to miss the opportunity to be free from tyranny.
An American politician who served as the 55th mayor of Chicago from 2011 to 2019 has said something that should always stick with us as a reminder of how they truly feel about a possible crisis.
"You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before."
-Rahm Emanuel