By David Futrelle
We like to think we can defeat almost any national trauma by remembering to “Keep Calm and Carry On,” as the popular poster declares.
It’s no accident that the poster, originally produced (if not widely deployed) in pre-war Britain in 1939 had a second and much bigger life in the US in the wake of 9/11, when we were routinely exhorted to keep going to restaurants and bars and theaters lest our social cowardice prove that “the terrorists have won.” (And there was some logic to this argument: the point of terrorism is to terrorize, so by resisting our fears and “carrying on” as normally as we could we lessened the impact of the attacks.)
But we now live in a world where this comforting fantasy no longer applies, where the health of our older and immunocompromised citizens depends on us changing our habitual behavior radically. Social Distancing is hard both practically and psychologically, especially in the US, where it challenges Americans raised on an ideology of rugged individualism to adapt a lifestyle that seems decidedly unheroic – and, for those who are young and healthy, to do it for the sake of others rather than for themselves.
So it’s not surprising that there are still people out there who still think the bravest response to the coronavirus is to refuse to change at all. Think of those who filled the bars and restaurants this past weekend – in Chicago there were long lines of St Patrick’s Day revelers outside the bars in Wrigleyville. Think of Devin Nunes, tut-tutting those too “scared” to go out and suggesting that visiting the local pub was the best thing people could do for our economy.
“I’m not afraid to go out and do what I want,” wrote a Twitterer called Lucky Tony.
In my world, it is … a necessity to go out and have a good time at my local bar and not be stuck at home cause of some ‘virus’ that scares you.
Now that bars and restaurants in many locales have been forced to close their doors to customers by decree – in part because of the terrible decisions people like Tony made over the last weekend – there are some calling for some sort of “resistance” to the closures. “It is now evident that this is an orchestrated attempt to destroy CAPITALISM,” tweeted the cowboy-hatted former sherriff and MAGA ideologue David A Clarke Jr.
First sports then schools and finally commercial businesses. Time to RISE UP and push back. Bars and restaurants should defy the order. Let people decide if they want to go out.
Or stay home and get delivery until the crisis passes. Is that really too much to bear?
Going out won’t help us defeat this enemy; it will enable the virus to do more damage. Hitting the bars isn’t an act of courage; it’s an act of selfishness that puts more vulnerable others at risk. Keeping calm is well and good, but carrying on as normal, well, that’s just what the virus wants us to do.
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ETA: Thanks for that A A Giraffe.
(Sorry for double post. Wasn’t able to use normal edit function)
@Weird Eddie
My favourite part of that Dilbert strip series (*sigh* the good times) is when the fourth day involves all clothing being abandoned and Dilbert calls a meeting attended only by Ratbert to discuss why monkeys don’t grow beards.
@ moggie
I love that. I was expressing my envy elsewhere that Arnie has a baby donkey running loose in his kitchen.
@An Autistic Giraffe
I was mostly referring to the modern anti autistic iteration, but thank you for adding the historical context.
@Naglfar
Huh. It must be a regionally different thing: In my section of the U.S. anti-vax is definitely an opinion only held by left-wing anti-autistic conspiracy-mongers. I’ve never met a right-wing anti-vaxxer in life (which is not to say they don’t exist). But here at least, if someone says they are anti-vax you also instantly know they are pretty far left.
@Ucalegont
Congratulations! My best friend quit before and it was some tough shit, so good for you sticking it out! I’m rooting for your continued success. ❤️
@Big Titty Demon : I didn’t see much if any left-wing antivaxxer, but the right winger wasn’t the most common either where I live.
Rather, where I live most anti-vaxxers are black-skinned conspirationists rattling about how Ebola and now the COVID are biological weapons and how vaccines are either a hoax or something to control you somehow.
The tags and grafittis also seem to indicate there’s a bunch of muslim anti-vaxx, but I never heard them talk about it.
@Big Titty Demon
Where I live and in the spaces I’ve seen, it started as a left wing thing but then got endorsed by a lot of right wing groups (InfoWars, FOX, etc) and now most of the anti vaxxers I knew are conservatives. A significant number seem to think vaccines are a Jewish conspiracy (which doesn’t make much sense because Jews are more likely to be autistic than the general population). If they are left wing, they’re the same kind of left wing as TERFs (i.e. left wing people that sound like right wingers). In fact, I’d actually expect there to be an overlap of TERFs and anti vaxxers because they both believe in big pharma conspiracies and don’t like scientific evidence yet were (and maybe still are) ostensibly progressive.
Maybe it’s different where you live, that’s just my experience.
I had measles when I was 8. It remains the worst experience of my life, it bloody HURT. And I’ve snapped my collarbone and also been hospitalised three years ago for a dual bi-lateral pulmonary embolism too (blood clots in my lungs brought on acute respitory distress). Anti-vaxxers have all of my hate.
Oh people might be as annoyed as me that apparently in a meeting with business leaders to procure more ventilators, Boris Johnson quipped that they should call it “operation last gasp”. The heartless Tory scumbag. Also the NHS is having to pay £2.4 million a day to rent 8,000 private beds. Why can’t we do a Spain and just take the fuckers for free? I hate my government with a passion.
@Ohlmann: I didn’t say that countries aren’t helping each other.
I’m saying that populism in America and across Europe and elsewhere has fragmented the global networks and made it hard to coordinate efforts to combat this. There’s no indication that Trump reached out to President Xi at any point during this crisis to talk about how best to align their actions. There’s no coherent regional approach in Europe. Brussels isn’t talking to Germany, Germany isn’t talking to Italy. It’s piecemeal. In 2005, Bush was on the phone routinely with world leaders during the avian flu. Obama did the same thing during the second H1N1 pandemic and Ebola. From this White House, there’s been nothing but silence. Trump is all about Trump, and nothing else. Populism can’t address global problems like this.
@Ohlmann, Naglfar
I did some research because I was curious, and according to the NIH (which, relevant to this link, I have faith in…) in this PLOS article, indeed conservatives are more likely than liberals to be anti-vax. However, this is a very recent change, according to other scientific articles that I am not citing because it took me 5 minutes to get my phone to cite that one, coinciding with a specific event. You will never guess which one.
Oh who am I kidding, we all guessed. It was Trump’s election, that was the thing.
Everything is horrible guys
@Buttercup:
Maybe that’s why this is happening now. If we’d had “business as usual” leadership in 2019-2020 the way we did back in 2002-2003 maybe this would have “merely” been SARS 2.0: contained before it spread very far in any of the countries initially affected. But we had Trump and Boris and Bolsonaro and fricking Doug Ford instead.
@Naglfar:
I think malaria is in the #1 spot, but smallpox is a solid contender to be #2.
@Moon Custafer:
I wonder if there’s a way we could exploit this: reverse engineer the mechanism, then develop a reset drug that might wipe out allergies and autoimmune disorders like MS. One would, of course, need to be promptly revaccinated for all of the usual suspects, including measles itself, afterward.
@Samantha Ravensdaughter:
Speak for yourself. Most people seem to barely tolerate me, with nearly all of the rest actively shunning me or else actively sabotaging me in various ways, sometimes subtle and occasionally through overt bullying, and this has been true my entire life. And this is when I put in a maximal effort to meet (known) expectations and be as frickin’ perfect as I can manage … even machines seem in some cases to be biased against me, presumably because the people who built and/or programmed them were and consciously or unconsciously embodied that bias in their product. No effort I make, for many people, is ever apparently good enough … On the other hand, this means I’m used to feeling alone, with most of the world indifferent to me and most of the rest actively hostile. Along comes the virus and for me, at least, it’s just business as usual with one more thing out there to worry about. The strange thing is I can’t seem to stop caring. I still want things to be better for other people, even when most of them couldn’t give a rat’s ass about me and maybe half of them take pains to actually show it. Indeed I seem to care about them more than they care about themselves, or each other, to judge by how poorly Sanders is doing, to the point that it feels wasteful at times. But I can’t just switch it off … and if I could, and if I then did, I’d probably end up being one of the assholes this site writes about.
@Big Titty Demon
That seems to mirror my experience with anti vaxxers. They also seemed to become a lot more empowered around that time for obvious reasons.
All this talk of anti vaxxers makes me want to record a parody of “Fixxxer” by Metallica called “Vaxxxer.” The song references sticking pins in voodoo dolls already, so maybe that could in some way represent vaccines in the parody.
I shouldn’t be as upset as I am about this, but my favourite indie cinema has closed due to the pandemic, with the message “we’ll be back”:
https://twitter.com/ThePCCLondon/status/1240299901159903235
Although it’s supposedly temporary, we all know that it could be a while, and I’m worried that they won’t survive. It’ll be a great loss.
My family think we’ve already been exposed to the virus. My baby sister came down with a fever, sore throat, headache and cough and didn’t come to visit for two weeks cos she felt so amazingly crappy. This was a month ago. She works at Manchester University in the student finance centre. Obviously deals with students who have been studying overseas a lot. So my hope is me, mum, my other sis, my two nephews and both my sister’s boyfs have been exposed and been strong enough to not develop symptoms.
I am getting kicked out of my apartment which is great
@ Alan Robertshaw:
I noticed that too in books and comics as a kid, especially ones written a few decades before I read them. Always figured that if the authors came out of a time when polio, scarlet fever, etc, were still around, then they probably did consider mumps and measles the “mild” childhood diseases.
@Lainy : that it’s even legal to do that in that time of the year anger me. That some people would defend the “right” to do that anger me even more so.
Good luck I guess ? 😡
My older-younger sister came down with scarlet fever one holiday at my granny’s. My parents tried to make light of it for my sake but I could tell they were utterly terrified. Thankfully she got great care and recovered fast, but yeah, not a holiday I remember well.
@anti-vax conversation
I have always assumed that left-wing anti-vaxers are way more visible, because those folks tend to otherwise hold odd views that don’t harm anyone besides themselves, where right-wing anti-vaxers are likely to harbor a whole stew of harmful conspiracy theories, and likely to generally be okay with harming others as long as it benefits them. The upshot being their anti-vax views aren’t what you notice about them.
@Lesley
Yay for libraries! I’m kind of ashamed to admit that all of this pandemic stuff really hit home for me only yesterday, when the libraries here in Finland shut down (the buildings did, the digital services are still running). This has never happened in my lifetime and it makes me very uneasy.
@Alan
I don’t know about other diseases, but some weeks ago I read some Finnish expert or some such say that we must be really washing our hands because there are fewer cases of flu than usual.
Re: history of anti-vaxxing
Not to minimise hostility towards science, but some time ago I read Michael Worboys’ Spreading Germs, which had interesting points on early vaccines. It said that since they didn’t really know much about disease vectors back then, and some of the experimental vaccines weren’t effective for that reason, it’s kind of understandable people were suspicious.
But that only goes for the early early days, and there’s really no excuse these days.
Keep yourself in as comfortable a headspace as possible and fight for a better world.
@Lainy: if you’re in the US then that’s literally illegal right now. Until the end of April (pending further developments) your landlords are literally not allowed to kick you out.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-says-foreclosures-evictions-suspended-until-april-amid-coronavirus-crisis
(Yes, looks like someone got through to Trump enough to make him do one halfway decent thing. Only one, and I don’t expect any more than that, but we might as well enjoy it while it lasts.)
@Ohlmann:
Or during this pandemic. How the hell is a homeless person supposed to self-isolate or social-distance? If they go to a shelter they get the virus, since the shelters are sure to be swarming with it before long, if not already. If they don’t they freeze to death, at least up at this latitude (unsure where Lainy is). Even during the summer there will be inclement weather at times.
Of course, this is leaving aside the whole “what kind of a society allows there to even be such a thing as homelessness” matter … especially when said society meanwhile has huge mansions sitting around empty with absentee ownership as “investments” and “stores of value”.
Again, the one silver lining in this whole mess is that maybe it will finally and utterly discredit capitalism for good.
The apartments are owned by my college campus, so yeah they can kick me out and put my classes on line so I have to be an hour away, on a farm, with really bad internet because I have no options. probably going to fail this semester.