Patriotism and Community Spirit

Americans consider themselves very patriotic.  Indeed, flag-waving and claims of American exceptionalism are everywhere.  Many people have the stars and stripes flying over their homes.  We celebrate rapturously on Independence Day, sending glorious fireworks high into the sky to express our patriotic fervor.

We are proud to be American.  We believe that our country is the best place in the world to live, that we have more freedom, more opportunity, more of everything!  Most of us have never been outside of the United States, but we feel this anyway.  We believe that our economy and way of life are unique and that the rest of the world would love to be Americans.

We also complain bitterly about any Americans who criticize our country or perform protests in sporting events or through music or the arts.  We heap contempt on historians and journalists who interpret our current state or history in any manner that doesn’t depict it as a uniquely virtuous example for the world to study and follow.

It is human nature to take pride in certain aspects of one’s life.  Normally, being proud of something is a result of having accomplished some feat or having worked hard to reach some goal.   But the fact that our being American is purely an accident of birth and not any sort of achievement doesn’t seem to deter us from flaunting our American pride and patriotism.  The ironic nature of this type of pride doesn’t seem to occur to us.

Interestingly, this rabid patriotism doesn’t seem to extend far beyond lip service or superficial expressions of community, especially if it impinges on any so-called ‘freedoms’.  One would think that such fervent patriotism would imply a willingness to sacrifice for the good of the community, to place a higher value on the common good than in indulging all of one’s individual desires. 

But this is not the case in America.  Indeed, we have less allegiance to the ‘social compact’ – the obligation to support the entire community - than any other developed nation.  The examples of this are numerous:

• COVID – The resistance to mask-wearing, shutdowns and social distancing because of their curtailment of ‘freedom’.  The refusal to be vaccinated when it would clearly help end the pandemic.
• Healthcare – the reluctance to provide universal, free healthcare to all citizens in the wealthiest nation on earth
• Recycling – the paltry efforts to recycle waste and reuse materials to support the environment because it isn’t convenient to do so
• Transportation – the unwillingness to invest in public transportation that would help lower income citizens immeasurably
• Energy – the arms race of larger and larger gas-guzzling vehicles in the face of climate change and environmental destruction
• Education – the huge disparity in education, exacerbated by the growth of private schools and wealth disparities
• Guns – we are more concerned with our individual ‘freedom’ to own guns than in finding a way to reduce shootings, suicides and gun-associated crime in our society.

Our patriotism and love of country is a rather strange, contradictory attribute.  We are in love with a certain idea of America, not in the community itself.  We love America abstractly, not concretely.  We love America as long as it gives us a maximum of freedom and a minimum of social obligation.  We love a mythical America of the past, an America that was never as ideal as we made it out to be, and one that is untenable in the finite world that we now inhabit.

There is a big difference between patriotism and true community spirit.  The former is an empty shell of communal vanity, the latter an action-oriented pursuit of a better world.  We need less flag-waving and more spirited actions to make our community, and ultimately all communities, thrive.

COVID, Confusion and Unintended Consequences

The COVID-19 pandemic has been devastating and tragic.  It is not over yet, and it remains to be seen whether the world can achieve a state of normalcy in the near future.  The vaccine rollout is well underway, especially in developed nations, but new variants and the abandonment of safety measures may allow the virus to continue to reap a harvest of death and sickness for many more months.

When one looks back at the way the pandemic occurred there are many interesting facets to explore.  I will look at a few in this essay.  No doubt there will be exhaustive research in the years ahead to attempt to shed light on the many mysteries of the pandemic.  There are so many variables to consider and so much data to analyze.  It will take a vast effort to comprehend its course and there will certainly be multiple conflicting theories, but hopefully a much better understanding of how to manage through a pandemic of this nature will emerge.

The first thing I will describe are the interesting comparisons between COVID and the yearly influenza that have stubbornly diminished the gravity that many people assigned to the pandemic.  Trump and his entourage trivialized COVID initially by comparing it to the flu, and armchair epidemiologists still continue to come up with fatality rate comparisons that in their minds equate COVID and the flu.

First, one look at the hospitalizations and healthcare overload crises that continue to occur with COVID should be evidence enough that there is a vast difference.  However, putting that aside, the impact of COVID compared to the flu is dramatically different.  Unfortunately, the CDC itself unwittingly contributed to the confusion on this comparison.

In 2004 the CDC changed its methodology for reporting flu ‘burden’.  In fact, no one knows how many people die from the flu each year.  Very few (less than 500 each year) deaths can be directly linked to the flu via positive tests for the virus.  Instead, the CDC uses a statistical analysis of deaths from diseases that the flu may cause – primarily pneumonia – and estimates the number of deaths.

The change in reporting was made to encourage vaccination.  There was a concern that people were not taking the flu seriously.  So, a public relations effort was initiated to more or less ‘scare’ people into getting the vaccine.  It was done with the best of intentions, but the unintended consequence was to make large numbers of deaths seem like the typical result of any virus.  The CDC’s PR campaign estimates the number of yearly flu deaths at 30k – 60k.  The actual death numbers could be a few thousand. 

Critics will retort that COVID deaths are also inflated.  However, this is unlikely to be the case because COVID deaths have almost all been verified by testing for the virus, and the deaths correspond very well with the excess deaths that have occurred (the number of deaths in excess of the statistically reliable yearly average).

Few people understand statistics.  The IFR (infection fatality rate) of COVID has been difficult to pin down in real time but it is estimated to be between 0.8 and 1.0, meaning about one out of a hundred COVID infected people will die.  The IFR for the flu is estimated at 0.1, but given the uncertainties and history of flu death assignment, the true number is probably much lower.  The 10-fold difference (or much greater in all likelihood) is huge, but somehow people have continued to play down the dangers of the COVID pandemic in comparison to the flu.

Another interesting aspect of the pandemic is the history of preventive measures different countries took to combat the spread of COVID-19.  There are many mysteries surrounding the manner in which the pandemic developed and spread.  For example, the lack of catastrophic impact in many developing nations in Africa is very hard to understand, even accounting for differences in average age.

The primary countermeasures used by developed nations were the following:  economic shutdown or partial shutdowns, forbidding or severely limiting group activities, encouraging and enforcing social distancing and mask-wearing, and severely curtailing travel.

The countries that strictly enforced these measures in the first wave of the pandemic were successful in either totally eliminating the contagion (New Zealand, Australia, Japan, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea, China and others) or reducing the level of contagion to a ‘manageable’ level.  For example, Europe was able to get their positivity rates (% of tests that were positive for COVID) under 1-3% and resume relatively normal life from mid-May to mid-September because they locked down until the rates were very low and conducted mass testing and tracking programs thereafter.

The USA, under a President who encouraged states to abandon lockdown much earlier than they should have and expressed skepticism of masks and other social measures, never achieved a positivity rate below 7-8% and never mobilized enough testing and tracing to subdue the virus.  Thus, the USA was unable to resume anything close to normal life.

Some countries, and in particular the European countries, ran out of patience with the lockdowns and social measures and the late summer holiday period sparked a new, invigorated outbreak that has continued to defy control measures to this day.

The USA has continued to have a high case rate and a high death rate throughout, though not as dramatic recently as some of the European nations.

The last confusing aspect of COVID that I want to address here is the tendency to grade the performance of individual countries by looking at the death rate per million and then do comparisons based on this statistic.  This is specious reasoning.  Each country faces a unique set of circumstances and its performance must be based on an overall analysis of its response, not just on a single statistic.  Brazil, universally condemned for its poor response, has a death rate of 1754/M today, while the UK has one of 1867/M.  The UK made some mistakes, especially early on, but to suggest that somehow Brazil outperformed the UK based on this statistic would be ludicrous.

It is very difficult to compare one nation with another.  There are so many variables to consider.  However, it is clear that the countries who have had strong public adherence to basic health measures such as masks and social distancing have fared much better than countries where people are skeptical of medical advice and stubbornly insisting on their ‘freedom’ to do as they please.

The dilemma every country faces – whether to sustain economic and social activity versus enforcing healthcare policies and regulations – is not easily navigated.  What is clear is that the countries who aggressively pursued public health policies from the start fared much better than those (like the USA) that dithered and abandoned their efforts at the earliest opportunity.

Free Market Religion and the Fear of Giving an Inch

Religious fundamentalists are desperately afraid of nuance or ambiguity.  They fiercely protect their beliefs by refusing to acknowledge anything that might begin the erosion process.  They instinctively recognize that the slightest chink in their armor of faith will precipitate, like the legendary hole in the dike, a disastrous sweeping away of their certainty and their fragile worldview.

For example, they claim biblical inerrancy even in the face of absurd contradictions such as the biblical acceptance of slavery and the long-discarded biblical punishments for blasphemy or violating the sabbath.  They refuse to accept scientific certainties about the geological age of the earth or the evolution of the human species.  Since the time of Galileo (and no doubt well before that in less historically publicized efforts), religious zealots have fought a rearguard battle against reason, science, enlightenment and logic.

A similar battle is being waged today by free market zealots against any efforts by the government to rectify income and wealth inequalities.  Any reasonable person, viewing the dramatic trends over the last 30 years, would have to admit that income and wealth have skewed dangerously toward a small percentage of the world’s citizens.  This trend is particularly evident in the USA.  Incomes and wealth for the bottom 2/3 of workers have stagnated as the upper class has become preposterously rich.

The efforts to address this imbalance center on a variety of taxation proposals, both corporate and individual.  There is no cry to abandon capitalism, to institute pure socialism or communism, or even to radically redistribute income. The measures proposed seek to obtain some portion of corporate profits and the income of the wealthy to fund much needed infrastructure projects, to combat climate effects, and to provide a more stable base for working families.

But free market zealots cling stubbornly to the mantra that the free market must be protected from any government manipulation and that the magical invisible hand will somehow guide the economy toward a happy and more equitable future.  Like their theological counterparts, they are fearful that any concession will bring about a total collapse of their carefully constructed house of cards.

And so, they trot out the classic counterarguments:  that this is class warfare, that the current efforts are expressions of envy of the ‘successful’ and rich.  They label it big government overreach and the road to socialism. 

If they would give an inch or two to allow modest efforts to test how we can improve the current polarization, then in the long run they would probably preserve a reasonable role for free market advocates.  But like the religious fundamentalists, who are unwittingly contributing to the rapid decline of all religious institutions, the free market curmudgeons will bring about their own demise with their stubborn refusal to budge at all in the face of obvious and imminent danger.