Part II: Lessons to Take To Heart
Lesson 1, We’re All In This Together
We live on Vancouver Island, off the southern coast of British Columbia, Canada. Victoria, a beautiful city and the capital of B.C., nestles on the Island’s southern tip. We’re in Nanaimo, about a fourth of the way up on the east coast of the Island (population about 100,000). (See my first post in this series for a map).
Vancouver Island is a big island with cities and towns, highways and byways. It’s not isolated. Airports and ferry terminals provide ready transport onto and off the island. By and large, Vancouver Island is like anywhere else—any other locally-defined area in North America. But not totally, not quite. Islanders feel their relative remoteness, a certain distinctness. We are terrestrial beings surrounded by water on all sides. That makes a difference.
To the west, it’s a long way to Japan or China, even if there are (or could be, depending on your route) a few other islands dotting the vast Pacific Ocean along the way. Looking east, you can see the towering and usually snow-covered distant peaks of the Canadian mainland across the Salish Sea (previously the Georgia Strait). It takes two hours by ferry to get from here to there—two hours from Nanaimo on the east coast of Vancouver Island where we live, to Vancouver city on the mainland.
Vancouver, B.C., with an ethnically-diverse metro-area population of 2,581,000, is a major west-coast urban center on a par with Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco. As in any major city the pace of life is, one might say, “bustling,” in contrast with the slower more relaxed pace on Vancouver Island. The occasional bumper sticker reminds visitors—and islanders: “Slow down, this ain’t the mainland.”
Living on an island, you’d think that we might be more ready than those on sprawling and more diverse continental mainlands to take in what is perhaps the #1 big lesson of The Virus—or at least one of the big ones: “We’re All In This Together.” It just naturally feels more true. We “get it.”
But then again, maybe not. After all, that big lesson, “We’re All In This Together” is equally true here, there, everywhere. That’s what this pandemic shows us, isn’t it? The Globe, “our” Earth, is humanity’s “island” in the vast, cold emptiness of space; and we’re all on it together, in it together.
The Virus vs. Trump
As The Virus was crossing national boundaries and leaping oceans, “speaking” (for those who could hear it) its tragic message of unity, Trump delivered the opposite message. His was a message of division and contention, you against me, us against them.
“We’re All In This Together”
“We’re all I this together.” How often we hear and see this phrase since Covid-19 struck! There it is everywhere we turn, in social and public media, in government announcements, and in places of business across North America. It’s a timely message; but Trump and his supporters couldn’t hear it, can’t hear it even yet.
Maybe part of the problem is that even though it is a timely message now, it’s actually one we’ve heard and lived for a long time. Long enough for those who are ideologically predisposed not to hear it to become immune, to close their ears, to refuse the idea, to not hear it no matter what. Historically, in fact, we have “all been in it together,” literally and immediately, for a long time—long before Covid -19 struck.
“No man is an island, entire of itself,” wrote John Donne in 1642. The truth of that general observation has become less abstract and more immediately real in modern times. We’ve all been in it together ever since the human world became tied together in a globally interrelated economy; ever since global climate change became a concern of scientists and eventually of almost every one; ever since social and public media began to bring bring events on the other side of the globe into our living-rooms; ever since environmental destruction and species extinction on a global scale threatened ecological networks of land and sea that ultimately support us all. And maybe, truly, long before all that, as philosophers and poets like John Donne have always known.
But those existential threats are still a little distant from our daily lives, a little abstract. They are there, they are real; but they’re not here. They loom ever larger on the horizon; but they’re not here, not yet.
Some of us may feel the hot winds of climate change. We catch the occasional worried voice on the news. We might miss the numbers of birds and amphibians we remember as children—if we’re old enough. Scientists warn about melting ice caps and plastics clogging the oceans. But for the most part we go about our business anyway. They don’t much affect our daily lives. These issues loom ever larger on the horizon; but they’re not here, not yet.
The Virus, however, is here. It forces us to experience our interconnection with others, our mutuality, in new and shockingly immediate ways. With every breath we take in the company of others, The Virus shoves it in our face, so to speak, that we are all in it together. Truly, “No man is an island.”
As people we know fall sick or die; as whole sectors of our economic and social life shut down, we see, we feel, that we are all, more than most of us realized, integrally part of each other, of larger wholes, of local, regional, and global social and ecological systems. A tiny particle of rudimentary life emerging in a city in China most Westerners probably had never even heard of spread through human populations around the world in a matter of months with devastating effect. It gives a whole new slant to the phrase, “It’s a small world”!
Being “in it together” means mutual responsibility.
All of humanity, all of us together being impacted by the Covid-19 Virus as we have been, invites a keener consciousness of personal and collective responsibility—one that’s more real and less hypothetical or abstract. Infecting each other, we affect each other. It makes you, me, each and all of us, more immediately responsible for each other whether we like it or not.
Responsibility requires action—both individual and collective action. That’s because the decisions we take individually impact not only our inner circles of friends and loved-ones but also people we’ll never even know. The decisions we take collectively reverberate throughout society. They condition how many people will get sick and die; how many suffer economic hardship for how long; who will be most affected; and much more.
We hear it said in different ways. “We’re all in this together.” “We each have to do our part, wear our masks, respect physical distancing guidelines, flatten the curve.” “By standing apart we stand together.” Mask mandates and closures of restaurants and other social venues, and restrictions on mass gatherings, enact our mutual responsibility for each other as government policy.
As the virus surges here we watch on the news as it swells and recedes in other parts of the globe. We see bodies lined up, too many to process. We hear obituaries for those who have died, and the tearful stories of those who have lost loved ones. As I write this (2021-05-09), India is experiencing a terrible surge of Covid-19 with each day bringing more deaths and infections than the last. Now, as vaccines are being rolled out unevenly across the planet, public health experts remind us that no one of us is truly safe until we all are.
What Trump Did
In the face of all that, what did Trump, President of the United States, “Leader of the Free World,” do? Trump delivered an opposing message—a message of division rather than unity. It’s not humankind as a whole, or even the United States as a national unity, dealing with a common threat. In Trump’s world The Virus is not so much a force of nature, a common threat, as it is a political football. It’s us vs. them all the way. If you define sanity as being connected to reality in a generally human kind of way, then there is a kind of insanity, a lack of groundedness in reality, in such a response.
It’s us vs. them. The Democrats will take away your freedoms, Trump blared. The immigrants take your jobs and bring crime and disease onto our shores. If you want to keep your country you’ll have to fight like hell. In a “long history of language that incites and demonizes,” writes Peter Baker in the New York Times (August, 2020), “President Trump has employed provocative and sometimes incendiary words and images to focus attention on demonstrations and away from the human and economic costs of the pandemic.”
From the beginning Trump made The Virus into a partisan issue. “Now the Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus,” Trump said on February 28, 2020. At the same time, he seemed to call Covid-19 itself a Democrat “hoax.” (Some analysts think that Trump’s “it’s a hoax” remark may have referred not to Covid-19 but rather to Democratic criticism of himself.” Trump’s remarks, often larded with inconsistency and ambiguity, leave a lot of room for interpretation and projection.)
In any event, blaming the Democrats for making Covid-19 a political issue was pure projection. It was Trump who politicized The Virus. Trump derided Biden for wearing a mask. Trump called for “liberating” states where Democratic governors had imposed mask mandates or restricted mass gatherings. In doing so he went against the advice of infectious disease experts and other medical professionals who supported the measures. Wearing masks, imposing reasonable curbs on travel and social gatherings recommended by his own experts, all became Democratic vs. Republican arguments in Trump’s divisive rhetoric.
Even if Trump did not actually mean to call the pandemic itself a hoax, he did repeatedly pooh-pooh its threat, not just at first but throughout the course of the pandemic. Trump knew all along that Covid-19 was deadly, and would become a major pandemic, as he later admitted in a well-publicized interview with journalist Bob Woodward. Nevertheless he continually played down the threat, undermined expert warning and advice, and opposed and derided efforts by state and local authorities to impose the only known measures—physical distancing and masks—that could slow or stop the virus’s spread.
Did Trump’s failures of leadership—did his vacillating messages and outright lies, his seeming lack of groundedness in the real world—have real-world consequences that affected real people’s lives? Of course they did.
Consequences
The U.S., of all the countries of the world, has suffered among the most severe impacts from the Covid-19 pandemic. As of May 9, 2021, Worldometers ranks the United States first in absolute numbers of cases—a million more than India which has over a billion more people than the U.S. and is in the midst of a crisis-level surge in Covid-19 cases at this writing.
| Country | Cases | Region |
|---|---|---|
| United States | 33,456,075 | North America |
| India | 22,585,749 | Asia |
| Brazil | 15,150,628 | South America |
| France | 5,767,959 | Europe |
As of 10 May 2021, Wikipedia ranks the United States first in numbers of infections and deaths with 32,707,750 confirmed cases, and 18th in deaths per 100,000.
| Country | Confirmed cases | Deaths | Case fatality rate | Deaths per 100,000 population |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hungary | 791,709 | 28,602 | 3.6% | 292.75 |
| Czech Republic | 1,645,061 | 29,667 | 1.8% | 278.05 |
| Bosnia and Herzegovina | 200,693 | 8,790 | 4.4% | 266.28 |
| San Marino | 5,067 | 90 | 1.8% | 265.80 |
| Montenegro | 98,303 | 1,540 | 1.6% | 247.53 |
| North Macedonia | 154,026 | 5,093 | 3.3% | 244.45 |
| Bulgaria | 410,202 | 16,929 | 4.1% | 242.68 |
| Moldova | 252,749 | 5,952 | 2.4% | 223.96 |
| Slovakia | 385,475 | 12,019 | 3.1% | 220.37 |
| Belgium | 1,016,609 | 24,551 | 2.4% | 213.78 |
| Slovenia | 246,082 | 4,293 | 1.7% | 205.61 |
| Italy | 4,111,210 | 122,833 | 3.0% | 203.71 |
| Brazil | 15,184,790 | 422,340 | 2.8% | 200.11 |
| Peru | 1,850,290 | 64,103 | 3.5% | 197.18 |
| United Kingdom | 4,450,578 | 127,865 | 2.9% | 191.32 |
| Poland | 2,833,052 | 70,012 | 2.5% | 184.38 |
| Croatia | 344,494 | 7,469 | 2.2% | 183.63 |
| United States | 32,707,750 | 581,754 | 1.8% | 177.23 |
Similarly, maps of Covid-19 infections on Wikipedia visually show the United States as among the most severely impacted nations by any measure.
How did the U.S., which prides itself on being among the wealthiest and most technologically advanced nations of the world—if not the most advanced—end up in such dire straits? “The United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world…,” writes Canadian anthropologist Wade Davis, but “there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the United States until now: pity.” How did Americans, of all people, in Davis’s words, find “themselves members of a failed state, ruled by a dysfunctional and incompetent government largely responsible for death rates that added a tragic coda to America’s claim to supremacy in the world”?
I won’t lay the blame solely on Trump, whose elevation to the presidency is as much the symptom as it is the source of the problem. But that said, it’s hard to separate cause and effect here. Once he ascended to office, Trump’s words and actions amplified the issues that put him there. When the pandemic struck, Trump’s vacillating messages and outright lies, the disdain for science and expertise that pervaded his administration under his leadership, hindered America’s response. The wavering, waffling, divisive and conflict-ridden reactions of the Trump administration to the onset of the pandemic substantially account for the U.S.’s costly failure to respond to The Virus effectively.
One expert epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins concluded that “people have died” because of the Trump administration’s lack of “consistent messaging on mask-wearing.” Another modelling study at Columbia University calculated that “at least 36,000 lives” lost to the coronavirus (As of May 21, 2020) could have been saved if the U.S. had implemented social distancing measures sooner.
The consistent messaging and the rapidity of vaccine roll-out under Biden’s leadership stand in sharp contrast to the previous administration’s actions. Recent data underscore the relative effectiveness of the U.S. response to the pandemic under the new administration.
Accountability
It matters what leaders do in their roles as leaders. Leaders take on responsibility, and accountability, in ways that don’t apply to people in non-leadership roles. At the same time leaders need to be somewhat buffered from blame and accountability for actions taken in office in good faith. It’s hard to know where to draw the line. But the “in good faith” part is an important qualifier, even if it is hard to know what might be on a politician’s mind at a particular moment. Leaders act in good faith when they at least try to put the well-being of the nation ahead of narrow partisanship and self-interest.
On the other side, individuals, of course, are ultimately responsible for their own actions. It’s each person’s own choice to follow and support one leader rather than another. But all that said, there’s still no way around it: leaders are leaders because they have followers, they have influence; and with influence comes accountability.
Given the above figures and studies, it’s hard not to conclude that Trump, in his role as President of the United States, nominal “leader of the free world,” bears some measure of accountability for tens if not hundreds of thousands of unnecessary infections and deaths of U.S. citizens—just as he also bears accountability for uttering inflammatory statements and tweets that led to the Capital riot on January 6 as Biden’s win was being certified.
Why did Trump chart such a divisive and deadly political course with respect to Covid-19? Most likely he hoped to score political points against Democrats, keep the economy humming along despite the pandemic, and further rally his “base.” That would be in character. Not the most admirable or realistic motives, perhaps, but understandable—assuming that is, that he didn’t know the likely consequences. Trump publicly disdained science and expert advice. Maybe he really did think that the pandemic would just go away like he said it would do. If so, you could possibly argue that Trump acted with some measure of good faith even if events proved him wrong.
But no—Trump did know all along that the pandemic would be bad. According to his own words Trump knew all along that the pandemic would be worse than he said it would be. That’s a truly damning admission, unmistakable evidence of bad faith. Trump made political calculations; and based on those calculations he lied to the American people knowing his lies would cost American lives.
Some Tough Questions
Could the United States have fared better in its response to the pandemic than it in fact did under Trump? Yes. It didn’t need to be as bad as it was. We could have done better.
Did Trump utter public statements and pursue policies for his own political ends that he knew would result in more U.S. infections and deaths? Given Trump’s own words regarding his response to the onset of the pandemic, it’s a fair question. And Trump himself later answered it. Yes, he did know that things were worse than he had said. Therefore they needed a more vigorous response than he pursued.
And if Trump in his leadership role as President did knowingly act in ways that resulted in unnecessary infections and deaths, should he be held accountable? And if so, how? We—all the citizens of the U.S., and of the world—won’t agree on the answers. But these are tough questions that need to be asked.