The American Way of Life vs. The American Way of Death

Spring in Michigan

As the covid-19 pandemic rages on, measures to blunt its impact on the physical health of American citizens are also affecting the economy. When you can’t work because you are ill or you have been ordered to stay home, the failure of the government to provide support for people in this situation leads to ever more misery and worry. States and local governments are also heavily impacted with loss of tax revenues and unanticipated spending on the acute medical needs of people infected with the virus. Legislation to address the economic fallout from the pandemic has so far been inadequate to meet the needs of ordinary citizens and local communities, but criticism of state and local efforts to mitigate the crisis is often misplaced. The pain is ultimately caused by the spread of the virus rather than state and local efforts to mitigate it.

U.S. Representative Trey Hollingsworth, a Republican from Indiana, spoke in favor of reopening the economy by easing restrictions put in place by stay-at-home orders from state governors. He acknowledged that there was “no zero-harm choice here” between lifting restrictions and preventing loss of life from Covid-19, the disease that has led to over 2 million deaths worldwide. 

“‘Both of these decisions will lead to harm for individuals, whether that’s dramatic economic harm or whether it’s loss of life,’ he said. ‘But it’s always the American government’s position to say, in the choice between the loss of our way of life as Americans and the loss of life of American lives, we have to always choose the latter.” 

Who is the Congressman suggesting we sacrifice to the cause of maintaining “the American Way of Life”? 

I’m not planning to do anything that hastens my death or that of my two sons who live in a group home with four other adults who are all highly vulnerable to the worst effects of the virus. And I am not convinced that we have no alternative to just letting the virus rip through the population, as the Congressman appears to be suggesting. I have always known that my sons, who have profound mental and physical disabilities, are considered expendable by people who don’t know or understand them and even by some people who do understand them and should know better. But that could be the effect of opening up the economy before precautions are in place to prevent the deaths of vulnerable people.
 
We are already dampening the effects of Covid-19 by staying home, easing the burden on the medical system of treating very ill people with the virus, and buying time to find treatments and a vaccine before we give in to it. Testing is of utmost importance so that we have a better handle on what we can and cannot do in terms of reopening the economy. We need tests to determine who is currently infected and contagious followed by testing for antibodies to see who in the population has immunities to being re-infected as we try to emerge from the trauma of the pandemic.

Help from the federal government to states to test for the disease (remember “Anybody that wants a test [for the coronavirus] can get a test.”?) has not been forthcoming in the degree to which it is needed. It appears to me that the President fears that if we know too much about the spread of the virus through testing, it will adversely affect his bid for re-election.
 
In terms of what the pandemic has done to the economy of the United States and the world at large, we seem to be in for a possible long and severe depression related directly to the disease itself and the failure to react quickly enough and strongly enough to stop its spread. The fear and uncertainty of a weak response to this disaster by the federal government should be worrying to all of us, but the good faith actions of governors to attempt to slow down the disease is not the direct cause of joblessness and poverty. People who are losing their jobs through no fault of their own deserve at least as much support from Congress and state legislators as the friends, lobbyists, and donors to the campaigns of politicians. Surely the path back to health and security involves dealing with both the disease and its economic repercussions together and improving on the inadequacies in our medical system and inequality in our economic system.