Isn't it about time: To get ready for the blame game?

If you look up the definition of Pandemic, it’s the outbreak of disease prevalent over a whole country, or the world, and is composed of the two Greek words for "all" and "people." Dig a bit deeper and the expanded definition states that viral pandemics spread to a significant percent of the population because there is no existing immunity. When there is no immunity some people are going to die. 

Over the past couple weeks there have been several columns questioning whether the virus containment is worth the economic costs. One of the objections to pitting lives against cost is that, "No one should be put into a position of playing God!"

Let’s put that argument to bed. Triage, in a MASH Unit (now a Combat Support Hospital), does exactly that on a daily basis. Whenever battle casualties exceed the medical capabilities someone decides who gets a black tag and who gets a red tag. First responders are trained to make life-or-death decisions. Juries do that in capital cases and a collateral debate is," the cost of life-time incarceration vs. the cost of the death sentence." Insurance policy costs are based upon actuarial tables. Families play God whenever they decide that the overall costs of keeping an older adult at home is more than the costs of assisted living. We have legal documents that enable someone to "Pull the plug." We acknowledge a person’s right to decide to die at home. The suicide debate is just emerging. The value of a human life is at the heart of E.F. Schumacher’s book, Small Is Beautiful, Economics As If People Mattered. The truth is that in our consumption driven society we play God every day and the pieces on that chess board are coins! Think about this next winter when our weather requires the decision either to salt the icy roads to save lives or to save the money for bridge replacement. 

We live in a First World nation. We are organized according to modern economics. We trade our lives for money and we can do only four things with that money: trade it for goods, uses and services; put it at risk (invest or save); give it away (charity) or hide it in a jar. An extraterrestrial would observe that our god is money.

We are a consumption-driven society. We are clustered in urban areas. Using Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: we breath air that we have polluted; we are mostly dependent upon municipal treated water; we have a mono-culture food chain; we are dependent upon a monopoly electrical grid, and our shelter exists in dwellings on parcels of land that cannot sustain us. We are organized for pandemics and we cannot buy our way out. That same extraterrestrial would also observe that humans are the Alpha animal. We are currently the top of the food chain on land, in the sea and in the air. We are the senior predator. We eliminate entire species. We are prey only to our own kind…..maybe?

Sometime around the first of May, 2020, the "Pandemic Blame Game" will begin in earnest. Every special interest position will trot out its professionals with their credentials, models, statistics and conclusions to scientifically demonstrate that it "twern’t them." The bottom line is that, if a bunch of people die, fault must be assigned for something to someone. That’s how we do it in twenty-first century America. Top-down or bottom-up doesn’t matter. We’ve got to find some scapegoats. Need to find someone to blame who cannot fight back. Got to put some oil on troubled waters! Got to get the consumer train back on the track! Got to get the lawsuits going.

Get ready for a debate over the difference between significant and exceptionally high proportion. Learn what is contagious and what is infectious. Study up on martial law and fomites. Consult your dictionary, or Wikipedia, about terms such as: Super-spreader; Contact tracing; Index case; Community spread; Self-quarantine/self-isolation and individual distance. If you aren’t familiar with Criminal vs. Civil, break-out the Blackstone!

Someone is to blame and has to be identified on the 6 O’Clock News-that is the optic of our time. If more than one is to blame, so much the better. We can enjoy days-maybe weeks of- who’s responsible for all those people who died? How much more money would have mattered?

A characteristic of the blame game is bias. Prepare yourself by reading the Double Issue of Time Magazine (27 April-4 May 2020) to get your perspective on how special interests are getting their hooks into this virus. However, try to put a little history in your judgement and carefully choose your moccasins. There’s plenty of blame and it has been around for a long time….just pick a side.

The smallpox that ravaged our Native Americans was introduced by our European explorers searching for gold. Our Passenger Pigeons and Carolina Parakeets were exterminated by our shotgun hunting farmers determined to protect their crops. The great whales were almost hunted to extinction for lamp oil, candles and corsets. The buffaloes were ravaged to starve the horse culture and force it to reservations. Elephant herds are being decimated for their ivory tusks and some people believe that rhino tusks will help their sex lives. Recently, things have changed. Polio crippled us. The STIs have affected a cohort and are climbing. The flu has killed birds, pigs, and horses. 

The current blame game will pit big things vs. very small things. Things that are easily seen vs. things microscopic. Before you choose sides in this blame game, take a step back and consider this possibility: Perhaps the very small things are just thinning our herd.