As if exploding from the womb of “The Coronavirus
Pandemic,” which should more appropriately be referred to as “The Great Panic
of 2020,” is a thing vastly more ominous than the virus in whose name it is has
spread like wildfire.
Even the sainted Anthony Fauci, on whose every word Americans across
the board now cling, himself conceded in a recent essay published in The New
England Journal of Medicine (an essay that he co-authored with Dr. H. Clifford
Lane and none other than Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)) that the real mortality
rate of COVID-19 is almost certainly comparable to that of a seasonal flu.
The real mortality rate of The Virus, that is,
could very well be comparable to .1%
Furthermore, The Virus has a lifespan. It will almost certainly
be gone within the relatively near future.
Though not something to be
taken lightly (as no infectious virus should be taken lightly), the Virus is
not remotely as big a threat as…the Flat-Curve Society.
The Flat-Curvers—the Social
Distancers in Big Government, Big Media, and throughout the whole country (and
beyond) who insist on the need to “Flatten the Curve!”—are
far more ubiquitous in presence and power than any virus.
The
Flat-Curvers in Big Government and Big Media, those who clearly have everything
to gain from convincing Americans that they are encountering nothing less than
the most dire and unprecedented of existential crises, I have addressed in
previous installments of this series.
Here,
however, I’d like to address the Flat-Curvers, i.e. the vast majority of
American citizens, the public, who have not only eagerly acquiesced in the
abrupt and radical transformation of their country, but who have, in truth,
demanded it. If not for their willingness to exchange the Republic (or
what was left of it) for which their ancestors bled and died for the Flat-Curve
Society, their elected representatives could never have gotten away with
violating their oath to uphold the Constitution and, which is even worse, be
lionized for doing so.
If
not for the millions of Flat-Curvers who are glued to their television sets
while “Sheltering-In-Place” (Newspeak for cowering in their homes), the fear
porn industry of which Big Media (along with Big Government) is the greatest
purveyor would have imploded, if it ever could’ve gotten off of the ground at
all.
A
friend of mine, a good person who happens to find herself squarely located on
the political left, remarked to me that she believes all of the measures that
are being taken to stop the spread of The Virus—to “Flatten the Curve!”—are
ultimately worth it.
The
ends justify the means.
While
it’s becoming increasingly clear that a person’s political orientation (which
implicates a whole worldview) is an indicator of his or her response to The
Virus, the view of my friend transcends partisanship: Self-identified
conservatives and rightists, at least up until this time, also appear to
endorse her position.
The
Flat-Curve Society seems to be open to Democrats, Republicans, and anyone and
everyone—as long as they subscribe to the following tenets:
(1)We are indeed at war. Let’s call it, “The War on The Coronavirus” or, if we are going to be a bit
more creative, “The Corona War of 2020.”
(2)The
end of prevailing over The Enemy justifies any and all measures (that
Flat-Curvers are noticeably selective as to the measures that they deem
necessary, or “essential,” and that there are at times glaring contradictions
between their prescriptions and their proscriptions we can put to one side for
the moment).
(3)All Constitutional
liberties, rights, prerogatives, and obligations must be indefinitelysuspended—meaning, for practical purposes,
indefinitely revoked—until the War on The Coronavirus is won.
In other words, the
Constitution, that which distinguishes America as the unique country that it is
and for the sake of which generations of Americans have fought, suffered, and
died, the document affirming their standing as free men
and women that untold numbers of our compatriots from yesteryear embodied in
their daily lives—this United States Constitution must be shelved until as such
time as Dr. Fauci determines that we are safe from
The Virus.
This tenet implies some
others:
(4)The country considered as
a civil association must be relegated to the
backburner until the War is won. All citizens must rally to the war effort—and if they don’t do
so voluntarily, then their resources in time, energy, mental and emotional
health, spiritual well-being, property, comprehensively, their very persons,
must be conscripted into the service of winning the Corona War.
(5)Elected Representatives
and the bureaucrats who they’ve appointed are not, as liberty-loving peoples of
the past understood, custodians of law but, rather, leaders, and they are leading the rest of us to Victory
over The Virus.
But if
those occupying offices of authority in government are Leaders, then:
(6) American citizens
are followers.
Admittedly,
Flat-Curvers will never explicitly refer to themselves as followers. They
probably don’t concede this even to themselves. But if politicians are
Leaders, this can only mean that the people who they purportedly represent are
their followers.
And since it is for the sake
of prevailing in the War on The Virus that we are to follow our Leaders, like
all good soldiers, citizens must obey.
Nothing less than
unqualified obedience is expected from all
socially responsible human beings.
(7)If their Leaders order citizens to remain in their homes, isolated
from friends, relatives, and the various communities to which they belong, then
they must, to quote one of the mantras of choice of the Flat-Curve Society,
“Stay at home!” in order to “Save lives!”
(8)If
our Leaders determine that, to win the War on the Virus, tens of millions of
Americans must abandon their businesses and their jobs—or at least those
businesses and jobs that our Leaders determine are “non-essential”—then it is
both lawless and immoral to do otherwise.
(9)If
our Leaders in effect determine that the wartime effort requires legions of
Americans to foreclose on their mortgages, lose their homes, and plunge into
debt the likes from which they’ll never recover, then this is what must be
done.
(10)If
our Leaders determine that the war effort demands that houses of worship close
and the Constitutional obligation of government to refrain from abridging the
right and duty of believers to gather to pay homage to their Creator (or for
whatever other reasons) be set aside, then houses of worship must shut their
doors to the faithful until such time that Anthony Fauci and other Big
Government Experts say so.
As even Redfield, director of
the CDC, recently acknowledged on a local Philadelphia radio program, 98%-99%
of people who contract The Virus will recover from it (what evidence we have
thus far suggests that the real number is actually even higher than this). For
the sake of accomplishing victory over a virus that may very well prove to be
about as lethal as the seasonal flu, Flat-Curvers will spare no expense.
(It is worth noting that as to what exactly victory is supposed to entail, the
Flat-Curvers from the White House on down have been about as clear as was the
Bush administration and its supporters clear to what they thought victory in
“the War on Terror” was supposed to look like: Will victory consist in
“stopping the spread” of the Virus, i.e. “Flattening the Curve?”
Reducing the likely mortality rate from .1% to something even lower?
Eradicating it completely from the face of the planet?).
To be clear, let’s consider
again those costs that the Flat-Curvers maintain are worth it to prevail over
The Virus:
(a)Constitutional
liberties, the inheritance of every American bequeathed to them by generations
of liberty-loving patriots who sacrificed their very lives for their posterity,
revoked;
(b)Millions,
undoubtedly tens of millions, of Americans forced into unemployment over night;
(c) The dreams, the American
Dream, of men and women who, upon years of investing blood, sweat, tears (and,
of course, no small amount of money) into building their small businesses that
have now been forced by government fiat and, even though not
directly, the whole of the Flat-Curve Society to
shutter their doors shattered;
(d)Law-abiding
citizens made into criminals and social outcasts for refusing to join ranks
with the Flat-Curvers, for daring to leave their homes for “non-essential”
purposes;
(e)Relationships
strained, if not destroyed altogether, for through their dutiful observation of
the imperative to engage in Social Distancing, Flat-Curvers have alienated, and
alienated others, from all of those institutions that function as buffers
between the naked individual and the State, those communities that shape
people’s identities, enriching their sense of purpose, meaning, and
belonging—what Burke called “the little platoons”: Familial relations,
friendships, romantic relationships, church and other local communities—all
have been weakened by the directives of the Flat-Curve Society.
(f)Along with the alienation,
unemployment, fear, and uncertainty engendered by the Flat-Curvers, there’s the
despondency, depression, and anxiety of millions whose lives have been upended
by, not The Virus, but The Society of Flat-Curvers.
Are
these costs really worth winning The Corona War of 2020?
“The Flat-Curve Society” is a name intended to sound like “The Flat Earth Society.” It’s tongue-in-cheek, meant to
suggest that just as it is ridiculous to believe in a flat Earth, so too is it
equally absurd to transform into a Categorical Imperative the fiction that
flattening the curve of a flu must trump all other considerations, must come at
all costs.
But in truth, the Flat-Curvers among the masses are no laughing
matter. They are as scary, really, perhaps scarier, than their
Leaders. The Flat-Curvers in Big Government and Big Media know that they are advancing a fiction designed to
advance their own economic and political interests.
The Flat-Curvers throughout the country, though, those who are
increasingly wearing masks; raiding grocery stores; hoarding goods; and
shaming, blaming, and attacking those who they deem insufficiently observant of
Social Distancing protocol—they are True Believers.
Yet they’re frightening because, as I noted above, the
incalculable damage to the material, mental, emotional, and, yes, spiritual
well-being of scores of millions of their fellow Americans, to say nothing of
untold numbers of other human beings around the world who will inescapably be
injured by this shutdown of America, couldn’t have happened without the zeal with which they’ve fallen into lockstep
and followed their Leaders in Big Government and Big Media.
The rest of us, those relatively few of
us who want no parts of the Flat-Curve Society, have every reason to believe
that there is nothing that its members will not do to keep from getting sick.
In the next installment of this series,
I will elaborate further on this ominous verdict.
Jack
Kerwick [send
him mail] received his doctoral degree in philosophy from Temple
University. His area of specialization is ethics and political philosophy. He
is a professor of philosophy at several colleges and universities in New Jersey
and Pennsylvania. Jack blogs at Beliefnet.com: At the Intersection of Faith
& Culture.
