A Nation of Willful Children

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“[B]ecause the virus can be spread by people who don’t have symptoms and don’t know they are infected, it’s critically important for everyone to wear a face covering in public and social distance.” — Walmart’s press release on mandating mask wearing in all its stores, as reported in the Washington Post, July 15, 2020.

With less than five percent of the world’s population, we Americans once were universally acknowledged leaders. Now we’re a global laughing stock and international pariahs. We have by far the worst per-capita statistics on the spread of Covid-19. Much of the rest of the civilized world now bans us from entry, not for political reasons (as we do many others), but just for public health.

Why are we in such a deep hole, when the pandemic began in China, halfway around the world? We had plenty of warning about pandemics in general, and even for this particular bug. Chinese scientists dropped the entire viral genome in our laps. We have, or used to have, the world’s best medical science.

So what went wrong? We didn’t take the pandemic seriously until it was too late.

From our president on down to Joe and Mary in our streets, too many of us are still not taking it seriously. We want our lives and our economy back without making a serious effort to get the virus under control. But that’s just not how pandemics work, especially not this wildly contagious, nasty virus. People are not going to spend, work, shop, travel, or entertain themselves in groups until they feel safe.

So we want what we can’t have, and we act accordingly. Isn’t that what kids under seven do?

We also entered World War II late in the game. But then we quickly became the “arsenal of democracy.” We sent innocent city and farm boys off to foreign continents to fight and die in the bloodiest combat in human history. We ended up supplying most of our Allies, including Russia, with food, guns, tanks, planes and ammunition.

To make our good fight possible, we rationed gasoline, food, rubber for tires, and basic metals here at home. We got our civilians to plant individual “victory gardens” at home, so our people would have a balanced diet while we sent most of our farm products off to the war.

Our women in their millions left their kids at home. For the first time ever, they went to work in defense plants as “Rosie the Riveter.” They learned to weld, machine, cut, polish, drill, assemble parts, and to design and build whole machines. They did all this under immense pressure, while worried sick about their men fighting abroad, and while enduring rationing of things that might have made life more bearable at home.

Our people did all this because it was necessary. And now they won’t even wear masks. Many insist on partying, dining, spectating and worshipping as if the pandemic didn’t exist.

Compared to the risks, not to mention the deprivation and suffering, that our people voluntarily undertook to help win World War II, wearing a mask is a trivial, even laughable, inconvenience. So is declining to meet indoors in large groups. Yet still enough of us balk to make the whole effort fail.

Yes, the underlying science can be complicated. Yes, we are learning about the virus as we go. Yes, our leadership has been fractured, inconsistent and mostly abysmal. But you can’t blame it all on Trump, Pence and Republican governors who seem to think that science is for nerds.

Our individual lives and livelihoods are at stake. And our economy is not coming back until the vast majority of us feel safe to work, shop, go out and congregate. Meanwhile, far too many of us are acting like willful children, who just won’t do the right thing to keep their own streets, stores, towns and cities—and their neighbors—safe.

Three things we know for certain about this virus. First, it’s a respiratory virus. It travels through the air. That’s by far its most common and most dangerous means of infecting us.

Second, it’s an unprecedentedly nasty virus. It can infect and degrade almost any organ or part of the body, including the lungs, heart, brain, liver, kidneys, blood vessels, capillaries, and even one’s toes. The damage it does to these body parts can be irreversible. So the virus can literally ruin your life, even if you survive it.

Finally, the virus can kill you and your friends, co-workers and family. It can do so easily if you or they are old, infirm, have medical issues, live in crowded circumstances, and/or are “people of color.”

Next to these awful threats to life and happiness, what’s wearing a mask?

Long before the pandemic, people wore masks and bandanas to ward off smoke from fires, bad smells, fog, and cold. They wore them at parties and balls just for fun. But now they won’t wear them out of what often seems no more than willful spite, or at best willful ignorance.

That’s what kids under seven do. They test rules and boundaries in every way. They complain. They claim they did what they didn’t do, or vice versa. They cut corners. They fake it. Some smarter ones rationalize their recalcitrance with sophistry worthy of ancient philosophers. For one specious reason after another, they just won’t do what they’re told and what common sense says is right.

So have we become a nation of willful children?

I’ll leave aside, for now, all our other failures. After six whole months, what was once the arsenal of democracy can’t produce enough live-virus tests or antibody tests to see where the virus is going and where it has been. We can’t produce enough PPE to supply our besieged hospitals and first responders, let alone all the essential non-medical workers who need it, and who are already getting sick and dying in large numbers. We can’t seem to organize testing, contact tracing, quarantining and follow up, although tens of millions of us are out of jobs and could be trained to do that work.

In short, we just can’t seem to get ourselves together. It’s every governor, mayor, public health expert, man, woman and child for himself.

This is what we’ve degenerated to—as a nation, a society, and a culture. People march—even carry and flaunt automatic weapons—for the “right” to be careless and heedless of the lives and health of others and the survival of our society. People who remind them how to act properly suffer shouting, taunting, spittle, assault and even murder. If you think of adults acting like children, consistently and in significant numbers, that’s us.

One striking recent discovery of psychological science is the importance of delayed gratification. By now, everyone has heard of the experiments. You leave a child of two or three years in a room with a piece of candy. Before leaving, you tell the child that a second piece of candy is coming if the first hasn’t been eaten when you get back. Then you record whether the child eats the single piece or waits for the second.

In follow-up studies over decades, a child’s ability to delay gratification determines his or her success in every aspect of life, from education, through employment and lifetime earnings, to marriage, children and family. That simple test of personal discipline predicts a child’s future.

As a nation, we Americans are failing that test every day. We won’t wear masks. We won’t maintain proper distance. We won’t stop going in crowds to bars, restaurants, parties, weddings, funerals, and collective worship. And we expect the virus to go away—or the economy to come back—by some miracle, without us providing the necessary conditions, including testing, contact tracing, quarantining and a consequent sense of personal safety and security.

We all ought to know the second piece of candy is coming. The virus won’t just go away, as our president and our other leaders seem to think. But we have the best microbiological science in human history. We understand DNA and RNA, and we’ve known the virus’ genome and its mutations for about half a year. We have diligent doctors and scientists working around the world and around the clock to develop a vaccine or cure. Some of them already have candidate vaccines in medium-scale clinical trials.

But just like the child under test, we don’t know exactly when the second piece of candy is coming. In the best case, it could be next year. It might take until 2022 or even longer. But there’ll likely be a vaccine or cure at some future time. Even if not, the pandemic, as distinguished from the non-living virus, could die out through simple control of contagion, as a result of diligent mask wearing, distancing, contract tracing, isolation and quarantine. That’s precisely how other countries have beaten it or are doing so now.

We can beat this virus as a species, and we will. Asians are doing so, in their teeming cities, with sidewalks filled with pedestrians all wearing masks. We Americans are failing because our personal whims—our much vaunted “individualism” and “freedom”—keep too many of us from doing what common sense and the experts tell us must be done.

Is this a fatal flaw in our society, our culture? It sure looks like one.

At this moment in history, our greatest enemy is not the Chinese, the Russians or Islamic jihadists. It’s ourselves. We cannot beat a relentless, ruthless, contagious, genomic algorithm without a plan and disciplined, society-wide cooperation. But as applied to the USA, the very word “discipline” now seems a contradiction in terms.

As for leadership, we now must rely on unelected, profit-seeking firms like Walmart just to get us to wear masks, even while shopping for necessities. What about doing something just because it’s the right, smart, and prudent thing to do, and because it costs so little and takes so little extra time?

Footnote 1: “Some [store] workers say they have been told they cannot refuse service to maskless customers, even if local laws require the wearing of masks. In recent weeks, retail workers have been physically assaulted, even suffering broken limbs and, in the case of a security guard at a Family Dollar store in Michigan, killed while trying to enforce the mask requirement.” (Washington Post, July 15, 2020).

Endnote: Brian Kemp, a Threefer of Stupidity and/or Evil. Remember Brian Kemp, Georgia’s current governor? He’s a threefer, but unlike Stacey Abrams, not in a good way. First, he beat Abrams narrowly in the 2018 race for governor, apparently with the aid of massive and deliberate voter suppression. Second, for about a month he’s been one of Trump’s “liberation lackeys,” seeking to open up Georgia for business before it had come close to containing Covid-19, and therefore helping cause the state’s current spike in cases and deaths. But the third and final rap against Kemp is even more extreme: he recently issued an executive order as Georgia’s governor, purporting to prohibit any mayor or lesser state official from requiring masks to be worn in public spaces. Now he’s suing various city mayors in Georgia to enforce it.

Hard as it may be to believe, you read that right. In the midst of a spike in cases and deaths that his own premature and unwise opening of Georgia’s businesses helped cause, Kemp is trying to forbid mayors and others from requiring the use of masks in Georgia—the simplest, cheapest and most practical expedient against Covid-19 contagion, and the best way to control the virus as economies start opening. It would be hard to imagine a more counterproductive move, unless Kemp believes that Georgia has more than its fair share of willful children.

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