Acceptable Losses

 

There has been a great deal of outcry over policies meant to curtail the spread of COVID-19 as it is argued that said policies are an infringement of either natural or constitutionally guaranteed rights. However, as America’s conservative politicians were found of saying after 9/11, after the subsequent ‘need’ to wholesale spy on American citizens was revealed, freedom isn’t free. Have the COVID-19 policies up until now been legal? More importantly, are they ethical? How much freedom, if any, is it permissible to curtail in order to stem a pandemic that at least on occasion sees people die?

 

As of this writing, according to Worldometer, COVID-19 kills 3.4 people per 100 recorded cases. In the U.S. there have been 70 million recorded cases and 866,000 deaths due to the virus or complications due to the virus, for a 1.2% mortality rate, a lower overall percentage in the U.S. due to improved medical facilities. In the U.S. for the unvaccinated, there is a 1-in-85 chance that infection will require serious medical attention. For the vaccinated, there is an approximate 1-in-10,000 chance of infection leading to hospitalization. I am leaving out statistics by age, ethnicity, or gender because they are irrelevant to what follows as a life is precious regardless of age, ethnicity, or gender. Is this not the case? It is the case; this is what abortion rights opponents would like us to believe. And, this is the viewpoint we’re all supposed to tow as a supposedly civilized species. But how civilized are we, really?

 

Not just in the U.S. but globally authoritarianism has been on the rise while at the same time there has never been a greater outcry for protecting one’s freedoms, usually by those very proponents of authoritarianism. While we might forgive political extremists for their blatant hypocrisy – it’s just what they do – there is a more sinister undercurrent of human psychology at work here. While no reasonable person is denying the virus that causes COVID-19 exists, makes people sick and occasionally kills people, what the people protesting for their right to assemble without even the most basic precautions are essentially saying is that any single person’s right to behave as they want should not be infringed upon even if that behavior potentially means someone else might die. In other words, our right to socialize in all the ways we socialized before the current pandemic should be retained even if there is a potential for one of the people socializing to die. This is not only (supposedly) ethically incorrect, but constitutionally incorrect in the U.S. I’ll explain, but first a quick yet realistic thought experiment

 

In terms of numbers, let’s suppose there are 1,000 people attending a concert: there is the potential for anywhere between 12 and 34 of those people to die from COVID-19 (a scenario made more likely if the audience members are unvaccinated). Even in a best-case scenario, at least 10 of those concert-goers are going to require going to the hospital and it would be a safe bet to say at least one of those 10 people are going to die. The question becomes this; in order to maintain the freedoms we are accustomed to, like being in a crowd at a concert, how many people are we willing to let die (with ourselves being among the potential victims)?

 

We calculate these kinds of risk-assessment unconsciously all the time. We do it when we drive our cars, for example. According to Gallup.com, in the U.S. there are .012 deaths per 100 drivers in the U.S. annually (or approximately 38,000 driver deaths) in order to preserve every driver’s right (privilege, really) to drive, with most of these deaths being preventable seeing how most of them are not mechanically related, meaning, due to driver error and/or recklessness. In the case of our actual constitutional right to bear arms in the U.S. there are approximately .0059 homicide related deaths per 100 citizens (or approximately 20,000 citizens a year) according to the CDC. The number of gun-related deaths goes up into the tens of thousands, of course, if we factor in suicides and accidents. That aside, in 2021 alone, 68 people were killed or injured in school shootings [edweek.org]. To be allowed to drive and own firearms, these appear to be acceptable losses for our rights/freedom to these things, whatever ‘rights’ or ‘freedom’ means. So, this should probably be sorted out.

 

When discussing these alleged rights and freedoms, we are probably talking mostly about those rights the U.S. Constitution affords, such as the right to bear arms (and not even have to be in a militia, apparently). Also afforded or protected are the rights to assembly, the freedom of speech, the freedom of religion (or not be religious), and importantly, the Ninth Amendment which states that rights afforded by the Constitution shall not infringe upon other rights. For most U.S. citizens the U.S. Constitution basically affords the right to go most anywhere and mostly do whatever we want so long as we don’t intentionally harm other people, least that be a violation of the Ninth Amendment. Certainly U.S. citizens have a level of freedom not seen in many other countries. Only how free are we as U.S. citizens, really? It might be helpful to think of all the ways in which we are not free and why this is important.

 

Let’s start with the First Amendment, which grants citizens the freedom of speech (among other rights). We are allowed to say whatever we want. Of course, this isn’t true – Explicit child pornography is not protected free speech and was ruled illegal by SCOTUS in 1996. Also ruled illegal is speech that incites violence/bodily harm, defames someone’s character, or tries to pass off someone else’s copyrighted work as your own, to name a few. The First Amendment is also supposed to allow us to practice religion as we see fit as much as protect us against state sponsored religion, only, several states’ laws contend that an atheist cannot hold office. (This is unenforceable according to the SCOTUS but has not been tested. Also, women have not been protected from religious zealots in Texas most recently and notably.) When it comes to the Second Amendment, which is supposed to hypothetically protect us against a tyrannical government, U.S. citizens can own assault weapons but not weapons of mass destruction such as a fully functional tank or nuclear weapon, which a hypothetical tyrannical government would be allowed to have.

 

We have a number of other federal, state, and local laws that limit our freedoms as well, and this is mostly for our own protection as well as the protection of our neighbors of whom it is irrelevant whether you like them or not. For example, while we don’t have to wear seatbelts, we can be ticketed for it and that fine will be enforced by a court of law. Also enforced by the courts is our responsibility to pay taxes; they have to be paid or we face fines or even jail. In most states, it is considered battery to spit on another person (without consent). In most states, we cannot marry a minor or marry multiple people at once. By law, we cannot arbitrarily discriminate against someone based on sex, race, religion, or national origin. (Yes, we know, this last one is broken all the time; people of color and women face gross inequities and mistreatment compared to their white male counterparts.) These are some of the more obvious ways in which U.S. citizens are not free.

 

Less obvious freedoms involve the widespread use of social media. The very people complaining about COVID-19 mandates are the same people who do not seem to realize that every time they use a search engine, log on to Facebook or other social media app, algorithms are tracking how the user behaves in order to keep that user engaged for as long as possible. Siri, Alexa – any smart devices we own – and the NSA are listening to us all the time. Everyone knows this. No one disputes the fact that major corporations and tech companies are doing everything they can to manipulate citizens into doing their bidding, and they often succeed. Oddly, or maybe I should be saying ‘unsurprisingly,’ no one cares and its never a part of the conversation regarding freedom(s).

 

These are but very few examples that are in place to reign in and control behavior for actors within a society for the safety of society. It is simply not true that a U.S. citizen can do whatever they want whenever they want unless they leave the country to become a king or queen of another country and they don’t use the internet.

 

What does any of this have to do with COVID-19? If it is not obvious by now, there is a pandemic affection millions of people, with almost one million deaths associated with the disease in the U.S. as of this writing. In order to stop the spread of illness – and possibly death –  it was asked of the general population to give up a small measure of freedom; wear face coverings, stay six feet apart, avoid large gatherings, and isolate if we felt the slightest bit ill or were in close proximity to a symptomatic carrier of the virus. It was also asked of the population to get a vaccine which would limit the number of people getting ill and more importantly limit the time during which an infected person is transmitting the virus. And none of this, so far, has become law. None of this has become law because if the population could not take the simple precautions first asked of them, making the precautions law would result in a nationwide riot. In short, Americans could not be asked to save the lives of almost a million of their fellow countrymen because individual ‘freedom’ is more important than those other people’s lives. That being the case, as with driving or being allowed to own firearms, we implicitly consent to acceptable losses. In actual numbers, for example, 2,462 school-aged children were killed by firearms in 2017; we consider this an acceptable loss of life so that the right to bear arms goes on uninfringed. The question is – when do the numbers start becoming unacceptable before we consider reigning in some freedoms? How do we arrive at those numbers if those numbers even exist? I ask because for some rights, it seems like no number will be too high for the U.S.

 

Concerning gun rights, the number did get too high for Australia. In 1996, a gunman killed just 35 people at a tourist destination with a semiautomatic weapon. Their gun laws changed within the following year and the country did not have another mass shooting until 2018 when 7 people were killed. A similar regard for life can been seen with Australia’s initial response to the pandemic.

 

When it was recognized in early 2020 that COVID-19 was going to be a problem, Australia closed its borders and required citizens returning home to isolate. The people who were required to quarantine were checked on by police. Some states and territories closed their borders to each other. Non-essential services were closed. There was bipartisan unity within the government to deal with the pandemic. Australia’s measures to protect themselves against COVID-19 was quickly implemented and clearly communicated to the public, resulting in nearly zero cases through the rest of 2020. Australia ended its zero-COVID-19 strategy in late 2021, citing that it was impossible to suppress the virus forever, which is probably not true had everyone (globally) initially taken similar measures. Australia, with its regard for its citizens lives, understandably wanted their people to return to life as it was before the pandemic. Unfortunately, they lifted their restrictions too soon, for instance opening their borders to COVID-19 carriers from less pandemically savvy nations. Fortunately, with high vaccination rates and occasional snap-lockdowns and other restrictions, Australia has kept their death toll below 4,000 for the time being. This is a vast difference from, say, the U.S. even despite the disparities in population.

 

It appears death tolls do matter to some nations. In contrast, the reason the U.S. has been so awful in dealing with COVID-19 has to do with the fact that compared to many other nations, U.S. citizens simply don’t care much about each other’s lives. Individual freedom must be maintained in the face of ridiculously high death tolls even when those numbers are largely preventable. It does not seem to matter how many people die in car accidents or are killed by gunfire. Recall that in one incident alone, in the 2017 Las Vegas Strip shooting, 61 people were murdered and 411 injured by gunfire. The numbers are astounding to everyone but gun rights advocates and politicians. If that incident did not change the nation’s mood towards the Second Amendment, we can gather nothing will. There does not seem to be any sense of national community. So, we should not be surprised that Americans do not care who they infect or kill by not taking any precautions against COVID-19.

 

Why is there no sense of protecting the greater community? Why do high death tolls that are preventable not matter to U.S. citizens? For starters, we can blame division on the internet that produces echo chambers for our worst human qualities, which itself is influenced by the larger tech companies that puts profits before people. We can also blame foreign regimes like Russia who have an interest in dividing Americans. The rich, such as the CEO’s of the afore mentioned tech companies, bear no love for the poor whom, they don’t seem to realize without, they would not be rich. (Also not a secret is that the rich and politicians only care about the poor long enough to exploit them, and this has been going on so long it’s accepted as just another part of life. My apologies for stating the obvious, which is apparently not obvious to enough people.) Blame may even lie with the American healthcare system, which only thinks in terms of dollars, in terms of putting a dollar sign on life, in terms of how not to pay for the medical care their insurance is supposed to provide. And, at the root for Americans, there is the false notion that the U.S. was a country born exclusively out of a need for individual freedoms to be had, with the nation as a whole to be burned to the ground should that notion be challenged. This is basically what the psyche of conservative America has been ever since people of color were allowed to voice their opinions and speak about their experiences with racism, jeopardizing white privilege. (To be certain, the current drive in conservative U.S. states to ban abortion is not because they care about life, rather, they fear being ‘bred out.’) Least we forget as well, history has demonstrated time and again that as human beings, we just don’t care about people beyond our immediate tribe(s). It appears frowned upon to say this forthwith, so history says it for us.

 

All this adds up to what I’ve come to call, again, ‘acceptable losses’ which in reality means ‘any amount of loss.’ Any amount of loss is acceptable to U.S. citizens to maintain their (alleged) absolute freedoms. Had the Las Vegas gunman in 2017 killed a thousand people, gun rights advocates and conservative still would not have seen a problem. There is no number of lives lost that would convince gun rights advocates and conservatives to willingly curtail their rights.

 

Realizing this, and out of curiosity, I’ve posed this question in my Ethics and A&P classes in relationship to COVID-19 or any other infectious disease: What death toll would be high enough for you to say we should curtail some freedoms in order to fight a deadly disease? Ebola for example will kill anywhere from 25% to 90% of the people it infects, allowing for various factors (with 25% being so low due to how the particular outbreak was responded to. Otherwise, Ebola’s mortality rate would be closer to at least 50%). Would sacrificing 25% of the population for our basic freedoms be acceptable? At what point would the death toll be so high it would cause you to say, “Perhaps we should curtail some freedoms so that there is at least a few people left to cook and serve me food at the restaurant”? Astonishingly, I’ve been given figures as low as 20% and as high as 80% of the population. While this perhaps speaks to an unspoken belief that there are too many people on the planet (I don’t disagree), I don’t think the people giving me that figure have thought through the consequences of 20-80% of the population actually dying. One student did mention that the allowable percentage would be based upon the freedoms lost, meaning, the more liberties that would be taken away, the more people we should let die because again, anyone’s possible and even preventable death does not supersede anyone’s right to liberty. Perhaps that 20% threshold isn’t being met?

 

While it can be argued that COVID-19 is not as deadly as Ebola, Americans have effectively said a loss of 2% of the nation’s population is perfectly acceptable in order not to have to wear a mask in public. While I understand wearing a facemask is uncomfortable, few people are willing to let a surgeon operate on them without one. In other words, if a surgeon can wear a face mask for several hours straight during surgery, why is the rest of the population so fragile that they cannot wear a mask in a supermarket for 20 minutes? Why is 20 minutes of someone’s time seen as too much to ask to save even one person’s life? Because masks and the other precautions aren’t effective? Then why hasn’t anyone criticized surgeons for wearing masks and washing their hands prior to surgery before the pandemic? 

 

I can understand vaccine hesitancy a little more. At the beginning of the rollout even I wanted to see what kind of side effects there were going to be as I had a bad experience with an injection in the military. (I had a sudden fever and passed out after a shot. To this day I do not know what they gave me that caused that reaction.) And, I can understand being hesitant of the vaccine’s long-term effects. But, I don’t understand being hesitant about the vaccine’s long-term effects when we do have a better idea of the long term effects of COVID-19 itself. Nor do I understand being told someone is worried about the vaccine’s long-term effects or being afraid of what’s in the vaccines when they are throwing back a Mountain Dew and a Hershey’s candy bar, as my students often do. There is also what I believe to be a reasonable suspicion of Big Pharma; while there is much money to be had by Big Pharma in the case of a pandemic like this, consider the fact that only Big Pharma had the capability to create a vaccine so quickly. Also, keep in mind that it does industries such as Big Pharma no good to intentionally kill the very people who would use their products, so that reasonable suspicion of Big Pharma only goes so far. At this point, it is a safe assumption that vaccine hesitancy and resistance is merely towing political lines and there is no actual valid reasoning against it, not when vaccines have been so effective in the past. I will not mince words here; it says something unflattering that almost half the U.S. takes its vaccine advice from a former hippie and Playboy model. (I’m referring to Jenny McCarthy, who started the anti-vaxxer movement back in 2007. And no, this is an ad hominin attack as McCarthy had no medical expertise back then and still doesn’t now.)

 

Now comes the catch-22: If vaccines did kill a small percentage of people, how many would be too many? How many lives lost are worth it to save more lives? Is there an acceptable death toll for vaccines but not for preventable infections? Hint – the answer is ‘yes’: Vaccines have not killed as many people as COVID-19, so it would make sense for the population to get vaccinated even if a few people would in fact die from the vaccine, as long as we’re making this comparison. There is no logical argument against how unsafe the COVID-19 vaccine might be as the numbers do not lie. Americans hesitant about vaccines because they’re allegedly unsafe is an outright hypocrite and again unapologetically towing political party lines. Getting COVID-19 is clearly more dangerous for everyone if a person is unvaccinated.

 

Now that we’ve cleared the air about what is acceptable in terms of losses, particularly those that are preventable, what I ask of people who will not take any precautions to stem the current (and future) pandemic(s) is this: I want to know who the toxic people are (both figuratively and literally) so I can avoid them. So, be honest and don’t hide behind rationalizations. Be honest in saying that you simply don’t care how many people die and that your individual freedom is more important. Be honest that human life does not matter to you. Be honest that what little is asked of you to protect human life is too much, that you are easily defeated, especially by a piece of cloth. But remember, you are the same people who (supposedly) are for the rule of law, and the rule of law is, at least in the U.S., that your rights end where mine begin. It’s literally in the Constitution. Read it from time to time.

A Thief In The Night

“Death never comes at the right time, despite what mortals believe. Death always comes like a thief.” Christopher Pike

I am in a bit of shock. I received word this morning that one of my employers passed away yesterday. It appears to have been an accident, meaning, this is all very sudden and unexpected. He leaves behind a beautiful wife and precious daughter.

Death rarely hits so close to home for me and as such, I rarely get to be reminded how fragile life is. With more than seven billion human beings on the planet and counting, the species hedges against this fragility by playing the numbers. But this doesn’t speak to any of us on a personal level. We tend to consider only our own lives. And this is a frightening prospect. Time waits for no man; when it is your time is up, your time is up as a friend likes to say.

“We must conquer life by living it to the full, and then we can go to meet death with a certain prestige.” Aleister Crowley

I had a dream (twice actually) a few years ago that I received a note that said, “In 2015 your dead.” My first reaction to the note in my dream was that whoever wrote the note misspelled ‘you’re.’ Beyond that I have been a little wary of this year, wondering if there is a specter lurking nearby. Yet I go about my business not so afraid that it keeps me from doing possibly dangerous activities. This aside, if I were to die this year, would I be satisfied with the totality of my life? “What if tomorrow never came? / Could I live with myself as I lie in my grave?” I once wrote in a song. This bothers me because I feel I haven’t gotten around to doing anything significant with my life.

“If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain; If I can ease one life the aching, Or cool one pain, Or help one fainting robin, Unto his nest again, I shall not live in vain.” Emily Dickinson

I try to take a solace in Emily Dickinson’s poem. If the point of life were to help others, then I feel I have contributed much. Maybe not as much as I could possibly have, but a fair enough amount for me to be satisfied with. But I haven’t done much for myself. As I have complained before, despite being one of the greatest thinkers to ever live, if I died tomorrow the world would go on without the major contribution to the world I wish to make. (Not that any of us really matter when you consider how vast the universe is, but the universe has nothing to say about how we feel about ourselves.) So what if I did die tomorrow? I suppose I’d be happy I’d get some damn sleep. But I fear I’d leave a world of people behind who have no ambition to accomplish anything. I believe this default setting for human beings has been the bane of humanity’s existence.

Fortunately my employer did accomplish much. He founded two schools so that people could receive the education needed to serve people in a meaningful way. Running a school increases and spreads knowledge exponentially. I am glad to be around people trying to accomplish something. As an educator myself, I hope I am doing a good job of helping people achieve their goals. It should inspire me to achieve my own. Everyone else may bide their time until death but perhaps there has been enough of that throughout history. While there may not be enough of celebrating life, there is even less celebration of achievement.

I will raise a glass to my departed employer. Then I will raise a glass to my own life. Then I will get to work.

…I leave you with these words from Plato’s Socrates, “To fear death, gentlemen, is no other than to think oneself wise when one is not, to think one knows what one does not know. No one knows whether death may not be the greatest of all blessings for a man, yet men fear it as if they knew that it is the greatest of evils.” Perhaps we should not mourn the dead, but it seems we have all mourned living too much. In the immortal words of the pop-duo Wham, choose life!...

Bugged

As is habit, I was going to take my evening ‘sabbatical’ last night when events took a surreal turn. I turned on the light and saw a small beetle on the floor. Without thinking, I tore off a piece of tissue paper and scooped the little guy up and threw him into the toilet. However, I did take the time to think that I’d throw the toilet paper so that the bug could not swim out from underneath it when it hit the water. Basically, between the time I scooped the beetle up and the time I was sending him into the toilet, I had consciously set out to drown him. I didn’t even bother to immediately flush the toilet and put the bug out of his misery much less out of my mind so that I didn’t have time to reconsider what I’d just done. Surely, most people don’t second guess themselves on such things.

But I’m not most people. As the beetle struggled mightily, I thought to myself Why am I watching him drown? Why am I killing him when I could have easily taken him outside? After all, the bug had done nothing to harm me; I just didn’t want it in the house. And so I took extreme measures against a life. I thought about this for a moment. It was certainly within my power not to kill the beetle. I could take it outside and it could go on doing whatever it does, no harm no foul. I reconsidered my actions, got a glass and scooped the bug out of the water and set him on the front porch. Too late; he was dead. This made me feel terrible.

I usually take bugs out of the house with the exceptions being roaches and ants, which I kill for (presumably) very good reasons. (Actually, I don’t always kill roaches, but I probably should.) But in almost all other cases, I relocate insect outside of the house. Why? For one thing, it is awfully arrogant for me to assume some kind of special status based upon my particular form of life. What makes a human being any more special than a beetle? Because we can think and have emotions and reflect upon these mental events? Because we are not bugs or some other species of animal we have run roughshod over, humans automatically ascend to arrogance in thinking that another form of life doesn’t have an inner world, much less an inner world worthy of respect. (Note that this kind of thinking has long been the excuse for genocide or otherwise treating differing ethnicities poorly.) We don’t know what it is like to be any other life form, so I do not ascend to the arrogance the rest of my brood display. Unfortunately, I happen to be of a species that needs to kill and eat other living things to survive. (Yes, Virginia, even plants are living things.) That makes me sad when I think about it.

Another reason I take bugs back outside the house is because it is so much easier to kill something we tower over than it is to respect its life. But consider the hypothetical situation in which giant hostile aliens with advanced technology descend upon the Earth and begin to lay waste to humanity. Why wouldn’t any such aliens laugh at us while we scurry for cover or plead for mercy? I am not trying to say it would be some kind of cosmic retribution, rather I am saying that’s just how the animal kingdom works, based on how we humans react to it. If we have no mercy for bugs or other life forms, we cannot plead for mercy (at least not without being pitiful) when the Hangman comes for us. That is, unless we really are the special animals we keep telling ourselves we are.

So I try to respect life, not because it will allow me to reason with or plead for mercy with the hostile aliens, but because it is the road less travelled and because I have the power to refrain from killing. Isn’t that supposed to be one of humanity’s nobler traits? I’m not going to say I am the most noble human being ever to live, but surely any bug would rather deal with me late in the evening than deal with most of the rest of you lot.