I
think there’s a growing sense that we have to find a way to live with this
thing, manage it the best we can, and muddle through. Covid-19 is not going
away anytime soon. Summer may give us a break, late fall probably not. Vaccines
are likely far off, new therapies and treatments might help a lot, but keeping
things closed up tight until there are enough tests isn’t a viable plan. There
will never be enough tests, it was botched from the beginning, if we ever catch
up it will probably be at the point tests are no longer urgently needed.
Meantime, we must ease up and manage. We should
go forward with a new national commitment to masks, social distancing, hand
washing. These simple things have proved the most valuable tools in the tool
chest. We have to enter each day armored up. At the same time we can’t allow
alertness to become exhaustion. We can’t let an appropriate sense of caution
turn into an anxiety formation. We can’t become a nation of agoraphobics. We’ll
just have to live, carefully.
Here’s something we should stop. There’s a class
element in the public debate. It’s been there the whole time but it’s getting
worse, and few in public life are acting as if they’re sensitive to it. Our
news professionals the past three months have made plenty of room for medical
and professionals warning of the illness. Good, we needed it, it was news. They
are not now paying an equal degree of sympathetic attention to those living the
economic story, such as the Dallas woman who pushed back, opened her hair
salon, and was thrown in jail by a preening judge. He wanted an apology. She
said she couldn’t apologize for trying to feed her family.
There is a class divide between those who are
hard-line on lockdowns and those who are pushing back. We see the professionals
on one side—those James Burnham called the managerial elite, and Michael Lind, in
“The New Class War,” calls “the overclass”—and regular people on the other. The
overclass are highly educated and exert outsize influence as managers and
leaders of important institutions—hospitals, companies, statehouses. The normal
people aren’t connected through professional or social lines to power
structures, and they have regular jobs—service worker, small-business owner.
Since the pandemic began, the overclass has been
in charge—scientists, doctors, political figures, consultants—calling the shots
for the average people. But personally they have less skin in the game. The
National Institutes of Health scientist won’t lose his livelihood over what’s
happened. Neither will the midday anchor.
I’ve called this divide the protected versus the
unprotected. There is an aspect of it that is not much discussed but bears on
current arguments. How you have experienced life has a lot to do with how you
experience the pandemic and its strictures. I think it’s fair to say citizens
of red states have been pushing back harder than those of blue states.
It’s not that those in red states don’t think
there’s a pandemic. They’ve heard all about it! They realize it will continue,
they know they may get sick themselves. But they also figure this way: Hundreds
of thousands could die and the American economy taken down, which would mean
millions of other casualties, economic ones. Or, hundreds of thousands could
die and the American economy is damaged but still stands, in which case there
will be fewer economic casualties—fewer bankruptcies and foreclosures, fewer
unemployed and ruined.
They’ll take the latter. It’s a loss either way
but one loss is worse than the other. They know the politicians and scientists
can’t really weigh all this on a scale with any precision because life is a
messy thing that doesn’t want to be quantified.
Here’s a generalization based on a lifetime of
experience and observation. The working-class people who are pushing back have
had harder lives than those now determining their fate. They haven’t had
familial or economic ease. No one sent them to Yale. They often come from
considerable family dysfunction. This has left them tougher or harder, you
choose the word.
They’re more fatalistic about life because life
has taught them to be fatalistic. And they look at these scientists and
reporters making their warnings about how tough it’s going to be if we lift
shutdowns and they don’t think, “Oh what informed, caring observers.” They
think, “You have no idea what tough is. You don’t know what painful is.” And if
you don’t know, why should you have so much say?
The overclass says, “Wait three months before
we’re safe.” They reply, “There’s no such thing as safe.”
Something else is true about those pushing back.
They live life closer to the ground and pick up other damage. Everyone knows
the societal costs in the abstract—“domestic violence,” “child abuse.” Here’s
something concrete. In Dallas this week police received a tip and found a
6-year-old boy tied up by his grandmother and living in a shed. The child told
police he’d been sleeping there since school ended “for this corona thing.”
According to the arrest affidavit, he was found “standing alone in a pitch-black
shed in a blue storage bin with his hands tied behind his back.” The
grandmother and her lover were arrested on felony child-endangerment charges.
The Texas Department of Family Protective Service said calls to its abuse
hotline have gone down since the lockdowns because teachers and other
professionals aren’t regularly seeing children.
A lot of bad things happen behind America’s
closed doors. The pandemic has made those doors thicker.
Meanwhile some governors are playing into every
stereotype of “the overclass.” On Tuesday Pennsylvania’s Tom Wolf said in a
press briefing that those pushing against the shutdown are cowards. Local
officials who “cave in to this coronavirus” will pay a price in state funding.
“These folks are choosing to desert in the face of the enemy. In the middle of
a war.” He said he’ll pull state certificates such as liquor licenses for any
businesses that open. He must have thought he sounded uncompromising, like Gen.
George Patton. He seemed more like Patton slapping the soldier. No sympathy, no
respect, only judgment.
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer called
anti-lockdown demonstrations “racist and misogynistic.” She called the entire
movement “political.” It was, in part—there have been plenty of Trump signs,
and she’s a possible Democratic vice presidential nominee. But the clamor in
her state is real, and serious. People are in economic distress and worry that
the foundations of their lives are being swept away. How does name-calling
help? She might as well have called them “deplorables.” She said the protests
may only make the lockdowns last longer, which sounded less like irony than a
threat.
When you are reasonable with people and show them
respect, they will want to respond in kind. But when they feel those calling
the shots are being disrespectful, they will push back hard and rebel even in
ways that hurt them.
This is no time to make our divisions worse. The
pandemic is a story not only about our health but our humanity.
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