The suffering from COVID entered our house, bringing a perspective to national issues along with it.
My 21-year old son contracted COVID in late September with minimal impact. Within a month a progressively severe outbreak of ulcerative colitis set in, and then myocarditis, which he experienced like a heart attack. The first is an auto-immune disease only beginning to be associated with COVID, the second is increasingly recognized as a common COVID-triggered health condition. One attacked the G.I tract, the other his heart. His immune system is literally attacking his otherwise healthy body. For the past two months, he has been in-and-out of the hospital three times. As of today, he has been at Valley View Hospital for three weeks, and is on leave from college.
I am grateful for the expertise and scientific approach guiding his care. I appreciate the good-faith efforts of many specialists and generalists working together. Once you get immersed in such care, it is clear that medicine is a living puzzle. As the treatments to address his flare-ups evolve, it is clear that medical professionals still do not know much about this virus or its’ ongoing effects. They are learning more every day. As the medical staff navigate his treatments, through fits and starts of experimentation, I have occasionally reflected on how their peers in public health navigated the COVID crisis this past year, how policy makers reacted, how we as a people reacted.
Though they have my wife and I looking over them with high anxiety, my sons’ doctors work without the media opinion-bloviators in the background spinning each u-turn of experimentation, citing each backward step as a failure. It was not the same nationally for the medical professionals. Each prediction of the spread, each model, and every policy decisions intended to protect us was undercut at the executive level in real time, and spun by certain sectors of the media as nefarious in order to reinforce their own biases. For his care, as with the thousands involved in addressing the crisis in state and local jurisdictions across the country, there were (and remain) human beings doing their best in good faith. They are far from perfect. Not all days progress forward. In one realm their work takes place in a theater of constant opinion-mongering without much actual analysis or humility. Those opinions meant to reinforce ideology, and enflame partisanship now pass as news, substitute for the search for fact and truth. When the patient is in front of you, it is clear that not every action is political. When we see it that way, we allow this noise to undermine important work being done. In reflecting on the differences, I have renewed anger that our national well-being has been so cynically treated like a game by so many this past year.
The first days of the new administration are making many things clear. For one, this past 10 months didn’t have to be so deadly or dysfunctional. There didn’t need to be so much distracting background noise. From the start, a national plan, and a mask mandate could have called upon our patriotic duty to protect each other from the virus and saved many lives. A coordinated national response could have martialed resources, pulled us together, and reinforced our faith in the problem solving power of science, in the importance of an effective government response to common crises. It would have been imperfect, for sure. This plan will certainly be imperfect.
Many will remember January 6th for its’ disgraceful infamy of the U.S. Capitol nearly being overrun, encouraged by a lying president trying to hold onto power, and the most dangerous, sycophantic of his enablers coming perilously close to violently halting an election process. For me, that day marks when our son was readmitted for the third time as his condition had withered him by 30 lbs. He wasn’t absorbing fluids or nutrients through a holiday bedridden at home. It was clear to us how close we were coming to losing him. I’m not sure we Americans are clear what were so close to losing, and could still lose.
Not all of the 25 million cases of the virus nationwide are resulting in symptoms, let alone lingering effects such as my sons’. After 400,000 deaths (and counting), the U.S. President has publically recognized the cost of this virus with a sea of flags on the national mall, and launched an actual plan to address it. Sure to be modified, a proposed plan can be debated. Picked apart. Amended. The plan will have many flaws. So will implementation. The lack of a plan, or good faith effort towards a national plan is no longer acceptable. After January 6th, a lot of things should no longer be acceptable. For a year, national leadership led us into a nosedive, denying the threat, choosing to make a mockery of truth, empowered by the complicit, egged on by enablers. They succeeded in making a national health crisis politically divisive in an attempt to motivate “the base.” Lives were lost. We still don’t know what else will be as we all reel from the wall of lies moving like a weather front across our country, a moving wall of lies about election fraud, climate change, whistleblowers, the deep state, leaving in it’s path this current outbreak of conspiracy theories. This approach to governance, and to truth is deeply corrosive of our institutions, our trust, and our humanity.
This was a deliberate approach to sewing chaos so that disrespect for the law, for institutions, so that rampant cronyism, corruption and ineptitude would disappear behind all the bluster. The Washington Post, dutifully tracked the presidents lies over four years finding that “Trump made 30,573 false or misleading claims as president. Nearly half came in his final year.” In response the ex-president referred to the press as “the enemy of the people” and claimed it to be “fake.” This is not just “politics” as usual. Lies have consequences. The repeated pattern of those actions and the lack of checks to it have had a real impact on our lives.
This war on truth nearly overturned an election, prevented a peaceful transfer of executive power, and upended this democracy. With COVID, lies and inactions led to untold suffering. While the suffering continues, there appear to be few consequences other than some arrests among those who stormed the Capital, a heavily armed inauguration, and another impeachment trial which is sure to be another circus of deflective cowardice unless there are secret ballots. Many hope to just “move on” as if we dodged a bullet pretending that the threat just left the building. Well, folks, it hasn’t.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn said about Russia, “in our country, the lie has become not just a moral category, but a pillar of the state. In breaking with the lie we are performing a moral act, not a political one.”
History will look back on each of our currently overlapping crises—the big lie about a fraudulent election, the lies surrounding COVID, and the economy, climate, inequality, threats to democracy, science and truth as an amalgamation of deadly serious issues made ridiculous though our twisted politics. I no longer have patience for the excuses, nor for framing certain issues as “political” as a means to justify inaction.
PROTECT our health workers and loved ones. Protect my son, who will likely emerge from this with a compromised immune system, we are told. Our current state of politics, and what we allow to pass as news has weakened our national immune system.
Wake up about the fragility of our democracy and our planet. And for the many people around you, whose stories you don’t know, be a protector of the air that we breathe. Put your damn mask on—please!
