Quarantine Chronicles, Part 2

AKA: Where do we go from here?

One way or another, all of this coronapanic shit will end eventually. I don't know any better than the next person when that's going to be, but ultimately one of three things is going to happen. Either it's going to kill us all and none of this will matter, or we'll develop an effective vaccine for it / develop herd immunity and it will disappear into the annals of history, or we won't be able to come up with a vaccine and it will just reappear from time to time, much like the seasonal flu. Given the low mortality rate, I highly doubt it's going to be option A, but beyond that, it's anyone's guess. Given all of the scientific resources being put into vaccine development and treatment and whatnot, I'd like to think that the eventual outcome will be option B, although we might have to spend a long period of time in option C before we get there.

Then what?

Before I get to that, let's take a moment to consider the state of interpersonal relations in America before the great coronapanic of 2020:

As children we're told to be afraid of everyone and not talk to people we don't know; I don't know if they still teach "stranger danger" in elementary schools, but considering that elementary schools of today were running "active shooter" drills - something that would have been unimaginable when I was a kid - I'm sure they're continuing to inculcate the mechanics of fear into kids at a very young age.

For American adults, I'd say it's even worse. It's been almost 20 years since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, and there's still a significant undercurrent of Islamophobia in the United States. His Orangeness, Donald The First, has also done a fine job of fanning the flames of white nationalism in the guise of populist rhetoric. A large portion of the country is afraid of the "rapists and murderers" that are supposedly streaming across the southern border (y'know, that whole business about building a wall and getting Mexico to pay for it). A nontrivial percentage of white people are afraid of black people, although I bet you'd be hard-pressed to get them to admit it. Anyone who isn't white is probably afraid of the police to some degree, although when you think about all of the unarmed black men that have been shot by cops over the past few years, it's kinda hard to blame them. Women are afraid of men thanks to the prevalence of sexual assault in this country, and even men who have never done anything wrong are increasingly afraid of women as a result of the #MeToo movement. The alphabet people are afraid of straight people, although to what extent, I don't really know. I think it depends on which letters you identify with. Being gay in America is, I would imagine, still much more difficult than being straight, but I have to think that life for trans folks is considerably worse. You don't hear a lot of stories on the news about random gay men getting lynched like you did 20 years ago; if anyone's going to get murdered for their sexual identity, these days it seems to be trans women.

I don't think it's a stretch to say that some folks on the left are afraid of some folks on the right, and vice versa, particularly when there's an added power dynamic thrown into the mix. Republicans get control of the government and everyone on the left freaks out; Democrats get control of the government and everyone on the right freaks out. They're both convinced that the other party is going to bring about Certain Doom(TM).

Are all of these fears justified? While I would personally argue that some of them are more rational than others, that's just my opinion, and in the end it doesn't matter anyway. For the people who are afraid of X, the fear is quite real and quite justified. My point here is just to note that most Americans seem to be scared shitless of one group or another, and even without a global pandemic and the concomitant uncertainty, we're already eyeballing anyone who we think might not be like us with suspicion. It's not even a case of "us" vs. "them" - it's more like "us" vs. "them" and "them" and "those people over there."

Now let's add coronavirus into the mix.

Unless you're old (like over 60) or already have some pre-existing medical condition, like heart disease or diabetes, the odds of dying from COVID-19 are actually quite low. Even with the underreporting of cases and the prevalence of asymptomatic infections, it's probably still the case that the mortality rate is higher than the seasonal flu, but the bottom line is that it's still not very high. If you get infected, odds are quite good that you're going to be just fine. However, like I said in my previous post, the outcome is still a crapshoot.

Moreover, there's no good way to know if someone has the virus, if they've already had the virus, or if they're immune to it. So everyone you see on the street as you make your weekly toilet paper run or whatever it is that you choose to do when you go outside is a potential carrier. You might even be a carrier right now and just not know it.

Fear often derives from uncertainty, and right there we have a whole lot of Heisenberg thrown into the equation.

But wait, there's more.

One of the things that public health officials are telling people to do is to wear a mask when they go outside. Some states/cities have made it mandatory and some haven't. I suspect that the mask-wearers are probably looking at the unmasked (like myself) with some measure of fear and/or disdain, because they think we don't give a shit about other people and aren't willing to follow the guidelines. But I don't think this is just limited to mask-wearers. When you don't have any way of knowing if that person who just walked by you in the grocery store is a carrier of a disease that may or may not infect you and may or may not cause you some great physical harm if it does (or lead you to infect others and do the same to them even without your knowledge), I think it becomes really easy to let yourself be afraid.^[1]

Now imagine that you're a black man in America and you want to wear a mask because you're worried about the 'rona. I bet your odds of getting shot by the cops just doubled. Or, at a minimum, your fear of getting shot by the cops just doubled, because now, in addition to all the things you were worried about before, you have to wonder how many people are going to see you as a potential criminal.

And, of course, let's not forget the conflicting messages from governmental leaders and public health officials all around. King Donald The Orange has certainly played a big part in this with all of the bullshit he's spewed out trying to convince people to drink Lysol or take malaria pills, or back when he was calling this the Chinese virus and trying to stoke the fires of xenophobia even further. Public health officials are, I think, doing the best they can, but they're also operating in a scary new world and without sufficient information. Early on, Dr. Fauci said that he believed there was no reason to suspect that if you got infected with corona that you wouldn't have immunity. Now the WHO is saying, "hold on, not so fast." They aren't saying that you DON'T have immunity once you get infected; they're saying that there's no proof that you DO. So you've got a whole bunch of folks who think that they're immune to a second infection, and nobody actually knows if they are or not. MOAR UNCERTAINTY!!

So what does this all add up to in the long run? Nothing good, I would argue. Take a whole bunch of people who are already afraid of The Other(TM) and make them afraid of themselves, too. This looks to me like a recipe for levels of xenophobia not seen before on planet earth. John Q. Public is going to be afraid of everyone. For some, that might manifest as mental illness and a desire to wall themselves off from society. For others, they might lash out at people who choose not to participate in mask-wearing (I am just waiting for some fool to give me grief over this - that person is going to have a very bad day). For others, and I think this might be the overwhelming majority, it's going to manifest as increased emotional distance from people, an increase in unstable relationships, and probably an increase in suicides and harmful addictions.

Think about it. How do you trust new people when potentially everyone you come into contact with might unknowingly kill you and/or your family? What will that do for interpersonal relations? Are people going to have to carry around immunity passports? Some governments have been discussing it, although the general recommendation right now is that it wouldn't be a good idea for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which the whole question over immunity in the first place. What will the future of dating be like? How will governments and corporations manipulate this fear to exert even greater levels of social and economic control over their populations? Some countries are already using cell phones to enforce quarantine restrictions or to assign risk levels to people when they go out. Apple and Google are discussing ways of using cell phone location data for contact tracing.

Personally, I see a whole lot more Big Brother on the horizon.

And you know what? For the most part, people seem to be OK with that. I was reading an article recently wherein the majority of survey respondents were entirely OK with suspending civil liberties in the name of virus response. Republican, Democrat, Independent - it didn't matter. You don't take that position unless you're afraid. Look at what happened in America post-9/11 with the PATRIOT ACT and warrantless wiretaps and the Snowden surveillance state.

Nobody wants to croak. Nobody wants to be told that they aren't important enough to be cared about by the state. People want to believe that in the 21st century that there is some great concept of human rights wherein everyone has equal worth and is deserving of the same basic treatment under the law and by their government. I used to believe these things, too, but now I'm not so sure - and I don't mean this from the real-world perspective where we know that equal justice under the law is a farce and the rich and powerful get better access to pretty much everything than everyone else - I mean that I'm starting to think that these ideals aren't the noble goals that we should all be aspiring to in the first place, and that maybe it's time to stop pretending they are.^[2]

Anyhow... depending on who you ask, "experts" are predicting that we will need to maintain some level of social distancing^[3] for months to come, maybe even a year or so. I don't think they have any idea what kind of negative impact this is going to have on the collective psyche of society, and the ramifications are going to be felt for years to come.