Opinion: What a global pandemic can tell us about ourselves

The last time I remember feeling part of a vast social experience is when my elementary school ended the school day early on Sept. 11, 2001. I remember the quiet anticipation of the drive home, watching my mother with both hands on the steering wheel, wondering what brought us back together so abruptly. Sitting in a linguistics class on Thursday morning, I felt that anticipation once more. My uncertainty was suddenly one with that of everyone else in the room as one student asked the professor about the coronavirus: “What do you think will happen?”

It’s a question we all want the answer to. What will happen?

We crave the power of proactivity that information affords us over our futures. But the rapid spread of a global pandemic is quickly revealing to us that proactivity starts long before the first case is discovered.

Other countries have been active in combating the spread for weeks now. Testing in South Korea has not hampered public movement too much, but has instead provided the government with much-needed information on how the virus transmits, what works and what doesn’t as far as preventative measures and what a potential vaccine would need to be successful. Its ability to quickly address and slow the spread of coronavirus is attributed to its single-payer healthcare system, something professor of Health Care Management at Berkeley Stephen Shortell identified as a key distinguisher between the U.S. and other developed nations.

Economic relief is, apparently, not for those most vulnerable. While Americans die of coronavirus, short-term economic prosperity is allocated to protect corporate shareholders. Sure, you could make the argument that this stimulates our economy, but does it save lives? Does it make testing more available? Unironically, in a congressional testimony given last week, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Robert Redfield defended the lack of agency proactivity by stating: “I guess I anticipated that the private sector would have engaged.” But it hasn’t. Mostly because it’s not really the private sector’s job.

Legislation has the ability to provide paid leave, establish free testing, protect public health workers and allocate benefits to children and families. It can fill the void made present by the lack of universal healthcare. However, instead of working with lawmakers to combat the crisis, our government officials most in control of organizing a pandemic response openly admitted that they were waiting for the private sector to intervene. In the logical absence of corporate interference, Alex Pereene of The New Republic remarked with snark: “How odd that these companies, whose only responsibility is to their shareholders, had failed to make up for the incompetence of this administration.”

Corporate personhood has led to a devaluation of humanity.

Businesses are individuals by law. In fact, they are the ultimate individual because they outlast the mortality of the human body and transcend individual profitability. Our economy not only values longevity over temporality, but it prizes immortality above all else. With so much of our global economy riding on the American dollar, $1.5 trillion dollars seems (to some) a small price to pay to preserve that coveted immortality. This stock market injection came hours after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell characterized the Families First Coronavirus Response Act — a bill designed to provide economic relief to working Americans — as an “ideological wish list.”

World nations are already labeling our pitfalls as symptoms of systemic problems that leave us more vulnerable than other countries. Not only have the requirements for coronavirus testing hindered our progress toward assessing the scope of infection here at home, but pharmaceutical companies and their lobbyists have worked hard to insert language into a $8.3 billion spending package that would prohibit government intervention in the case that companies were keeping the vaccines or drugs — developed with taxpayer money — behind a paywall too high for the average American to climb.

That we should have to work so hard to adapt so little is a sure sign that Reaganomics and the drive of consumer individualism has failed us deeply. A global crisis, a virus blind to boundaries and borders, has laid bare the cruelty of both our social and economic infrastructure.

That our economic policies and federal governing practices were not prepared for a crisis of this size and scope is a symptom, prominent linguist Noam Chomsky would say, of a failed state: “Among the most salient properties of failed states is that they do not protect their citizens from violence — and perhaps even destruction — or that decision makers regard such concerns as lower in priority than the short-term power and wealth of the state’s dominant sectors.”

When Bernie Sanders suggests that Medicare for All would allocate not only opportunity, but human dignity, to the 27.5 million people operating without health insurance in America, he is often met with a barrage of questions about payment. However, when corporate interests see a dip due to the administration’s failings to cope, they are met with over $1 trillion in stimulus, not questions. Where are the droves of moderates who declared during this primary season, “But, how will we pay for it?”

Second- and third-wave feminist movements of the 1960s articulated this tension for us: ‘the personal is political.’ We are not only our politics, but we are also the fallout we reap when our policies fail us. So, when it comes to coronavirus, what will happen is already happening. We are being forced to reckon with decades of legislative movements and sociopolitical paradigms that have placed us in this very position, and the questions we choose to ask ourselves will drastically change the political landscape in this country as we know it.

Featured image created by Keith Wilson. The opinions in this article do not necessarily reflect his own.