Things Didn’t Have To Be This Way
This is a two-part series on the Coronavirus situation in America under the themes of anger and hope.
First, the place for anger – “Things Didn’t Have to be This Way.”
Today, Coronavirus (or CV) is the third leading cause of death in the United States. Unless something unforeseen happens, it will take the gold metal this year in the cause of death category. Some hospitals are still doing fine at the moment, but many hospitals are overrun with CV patients, and many more are nearing the tipping point. And we’re just getting started. A staggering number of Americans, our leaders included, dismissed CV with the help of faulty numbers and faulty logic. They compared the total annual deaths from the seasonal flu, to the total deaths from CV and scoffed. The seasonal flu has long since saturated our population while CV has just arrived. By the time CV has saturated our population, no one will be saying, “It’s just the flu.”
Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) like gloves, masks and gowns are in dangerously short supply. Our access to critical medical supplies and vital medicines that we depend on is in jeopardy because we off-shored our supply chain to our economic and political rivals and our ideological enemies. As a country, we willingly put our head in the tiger’s mouth so that big business could increase their bottom line by chasing low wage, low human rights, low environmental regulation, and corrupt government environments around the globe to do business in. CV is helping us see this reality in stark contrast as we are facing shortages of critical supplies and medicines. Even now, 3M, an American corporation is selling vitally needed face masks to foreign countries for higher profits instead of fulfilling existing orders to American medical and emergency response organizations. None of these truths are anti-corporation or an anti-free market, but CV is making the flaws of globalism self-evident.
We shouldn’t be surprised that we were lied to about CV by the Chinese Communist Party. They lied about what they knew of the virus and when they knew it. They disappeared people who tried to warn the world about it and they possibly lied about where it came from. All this is to be expected. They are communists. They win all the awards for disappearing, silencing, controlling, enslaving, and murdering their own people. On a per capita basis their only rival on the world stage at the moment would be their client state, North Korea.
What should make us scratch our heads however is why we bound our fates so closely with them by giving them Most Favored Nation Status back in the 90s. The only moral justification I’ve ever heard for transferring so much wealth, jobs, and opportunity to communist China was the flawed idea that if we helped them develop economically until they had a middle class, that middle class would successfully push for a representative government – like Western countries – and overthrow their communist regime. It’s a naïve and misinformed notion at best. Western countries didn’t fight for representative governments, human rights, individual liberty, and rule of law because of economic prosperity. No! We developed all of those things in the West, including economic prosperity, out of theological convictions rooted in Christian cultural influences. This flimsy moral justification by America, Inc. was most likely only a thin cover for the real motive – the greed of globalist corporate executives and their pursuit of exploitable low-wage workers and lax regulatory environments.
Lies from China is a given, but lies and betrayal from our own leaders and tax payer funded institutions shouldn’t be. The medical director at our local Emory Decatur Hospital called our country “criminally unprepared” and I couldn’t agree more. Pretend that you have a house and you pay for homeowner’s insurance every month, year after year, with the assumption that if your house should ever burn down, they would give you the money to replace it. It is a responsible way of being prepared for an unlikely but potentially catastrophic event. Then one day, your house burns down. It’s tragic, but not to worry, you have homeowner’s insurance for just this situation. You call your insurance company and tell them what happened and they say, “Oh, I am so sorry we aren’t financially prepared to cover the cost of your house right now. I’ll call you back in a couple of months to let you know if we could build you a shed or something?”
That is a close approximation of how our trust and investment in our public institutions has played out when it really counts. We give billions of dollars to organizations like the Center for Disease Control, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and the World Health Organization with the expectation that, like homeowner’s insurance, they will be prepared to deal with potentially catastrophic threats related to diseases, public health, and emergencies in something close to the manner in which they are funded. This is tragically not the case.
Despite decades of alarm bells going off through books, white papers, speeches, think tank reports, and even a TED Talk by Bill Gates warning that we as a country aren’t ready for the next pandemic – and it’s coming – the people and institutions that are paid to get our nation ready, were unprepared beyond anyone’s estimation. The World Health Organization – which American tax payers heavily fund – apparently helped cover up the Chinese communist evil doings (see HERE and HERE) and delayed an effective global response costing who knows how many lives. The CDC’s staggeringly slow response has been the polar opposite of pro-active and their inability to produce a CV test for months meant that American’s response has had no choice but to fly blind. Many in our media and political establishment dangerously downplayed the obvious threat for far too long – failing to lead, to guide, to prepare, or protect.
At the beginning of March, our Surgeon General made a statement that will go down in history saying, “Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS! They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!” This is doublespeak that can be translated as, “Masks are magic. They only protect healthcare provider type humans from the Coronavirus, they don’t protect regular type humans.” An honest statement might have sounded more like, “Americans, your trusted leaders and institutions are criminally unprepared to face this threat that we have been warned about for decades and you have trusted us with billions of dollars every year to prepare for. Because your trusted leaders have created this situation, we have a critical shortage of needed and effective personal protective equipment and need to prioritize who we keep safe. Please stop buying masks to protect yourselves so that we can better protect our healthcare providers.”
A more deeply disturbing thing about this statement from our surgeon general, other political and institutional leaders, and the talking heads of media is that even this week they downplay the importance of masks and the airborne transmission of CV – something that is well-known around the world. The problem is, that any talk of the importance of masks or the air transmission of the virus serves to highlight how criminally unprepared we are as a country. A policy of “Everyone wear a mask” is incredibly effective at combating the spread of CV, but it isn’t possible in America at the moment because we don’t have the supplies and we have off-shored so much of our critical production capabilities. There are a few signs of things changing on this though – see HERE, HERE, HERE, and HERE (last one is just for fun. If the Czechs are getting it, we can too!).
Not only are we not able to implement an “Everyone wear a mask” policy or even be honest about it, we also haven’t been able to implement a “test and isolate” policy like some other countries have – because we haven’t been able to produce the tests. Hundreds of companies in the US could have been rolling out the tests months ago and the formula and design for the tests were readily available online. We completely had the ability to create the tests that are critical to a “test and isolate” strategy, but we didn’t have the government permission. Our government with its laws, regulations, and inefficiencies got in the way – and the result is an unfolding tragedy. In case you were unaware, America does not have either a free market healthcare system or a single-payer healthcare system. We have a heavily bureaucrat-regulated healthcare system that is largely bought and paid for by insurance companies who profit from human suffering.
What all this criminal lack of leadership, supplies, and test kits means is that more people are going to get sick, more people are going to die, and we have had to shut down our economy to even have a hope of minimizing this thing.
And this is bad, because our economy is – and has been for a very long time – a house of cards and the Coronavirus, magnified by our inept response to it, is a wrecking ball. Back in 2008, the head of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Stauss-Kahn said the global financial system is on “the brink of a systemic meltdown.” We “successfully” addressed the problem at the time by generating what was then an unfathomable amount of debt, forcing interest rates to effectively zero, and borrowing money into existence. It papered over the crisis and bought us time. Most people thought that things were fixed, but in reality we were all just swimming in an ocean of debt – government debt, corporate debt, and personal debt. Today the papered over cracks in the foundation of our economic house are opening up again and we are addressing the problems with the same tools as before – just more so – more debt, negative interest rates, and oceans of money borrowed into existence. I hope these measures will once more be able to paper over the crisis and buy us more time. . . but one day it won’t.
Someday, the piper will have to be paid.
All of this makes me angry. All of it, and I am telling you for a reason. Here it is – THINGS DIDN’T HAVE TO BE THIS WAY. I am angry because I love people and don’t want people to suffer. I am angry because every bit of this means unnecessary suffering for people due to the neglect, incompetence, and corruption of others. I am angry for the healthcare workers who are going to have to go to war for us against overwhelming odds. I am angry for the people who will lose their jobs or careers. I am angry for the people who will get terribly sick who otherwise wouldn’t have. I’m angry for all the people who will have to say good-bye to someone they love when they otherwise wouldn’t have so soon.
I know it could have been different than what it is and what it will be because I see other countries handling things differently. As one example, South Korea has – and is able to have – an “Everyone wears a mask” and a “Test and Isolate” response. Their government got out of the way of their pharmaceutical companies so they could make effective CV test kits and then their government put to good use the kits and masks that their industries produced. Getting the kits deployed quickly, they isolated the infected, and never shut down their economy. In doing this, they successfully flattened the curve of CV while drastically limiting the disruption to their society. Read (HERE, HERE, HERE, and HERE). They are now exporting tests and equipment to help affected countries around the world.
We could have been like South Korea – or even better. We spent the money to be better. Things could have been different. We could have been prepared. We could have been ready. It was going to be rough anyway – but it could have been better.
Tragically, since we couldn’t get our own metaphorical oxygen mask on first, and are really still struggling to get it on, we won’t be able to be there to help other countries as this plague is knocking at their door. What will happen when this hits the slums of India or the favelas of Brazil? How could we have been there for those people if we had had our own house in order?
I am angry because there are things worth being angry about. I am also incredibly hopeful about some things I see happening in the world and I look forward to sharing that hope with you in my next post – “The Deepening of Our Souls.”
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