April 14
To Gleaves Whitney and his blogpost on what has caused Americans to be so strongly divided. In the end, he blames it on Post Modernism. This appeared in the Imaginative Conservative Blog.
With many words Whitney in the end gives an traditional-American centric view of what ails us. And that view is that despite our past imperfections, the real threat is what's new: Post Modernism. But such a view minimizes our nation's past indiscretions.
I don't think that many minority scholars would so easily describe America as having merely struggling to navigate polarities. From our founding fathers, we have been dominated by the post-Cold War definition of tribalism: extreme loyalty to a group, and I would add that such loyalty would trump commitment to universal moral values and including recognizing our equality. And while we could place part of the blame for that on the need for security, it is also do for the need for significance where significance is found in superiority. And again, the founding fathers embraced such tribaiism rather than try to give us mechanisms to temper it. The Federalists, many of whom contributed to the writing of The Constitution, used slander to describe those whose political and economic ideas they threatening and thus opposed them.
In addition, I am not sure about the diversity Toqueville saw because racial diversity was treated with more than just social distancing. Actually, America was founded on white supremacy. This is evident from land acquisition, The Constitution, rights recognized, wealth distribution, and society's pecking order. The exploitation of others was so much a part of American life as well as that of the Western World that Post Modernists saw that the real destroyer of any unified view of the world were those who came from Christianity and the Enlightenment. Post Modernists were simply that those who claimed to have a certain, especially exclusive, knowledge of what is truth denied that truth with their actions.
And thus, Whitney's description of Post Modernism invites the same divide that he writes against elsewhere.
But perhaps the reasons, as well as cures, for our divisions are simpler than what Whitney proposes. To Martin Luther King Jr., what divided us was not based in our animal nature or any deep philosophical divide. It was based on the fact that we value things more than people.
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To David Deavel and his blogpost charging that the Covid-19 response in this nation has been an vast overreaction and that some of the stats being reported are inflated. IN the end, he wants an end to the lockdown that he seems not to have though was necessary. He does make a valid point in noting that the lockdown has hurt our economy. this appeared in the Imaginative Conservative blog.
Statsistics used in my response use statistics reported in the website: www.covid19stats.com and the worldometers.info/world-population websites.
I understand the conservative reaction to the Covid-19 response. The change is so drastic that the resulting dissonance looks for relief, and denying the threat of the virus is the easiest form of relief.
But one only needs to review the results of what has been happening in other nations to see why our current response, though uncomfortable and threatening to some more than others, is certainly justified.
Italy saw 12.83% of those infected with the virus die and the demand on their healthcare resources was overwhelming. Even with their late lockdown, they saw 0.263% f their people infected in just a couple of months. Spain, like Italy, responded late and saw death rate from the infection of 10.44% while 0.364% of their population was infected in just a couple of months.
Sweden and the UK have not followed the same path that the US has and the rates from the virus are at 8.39% and 12.67% respectively. But it should also be added that their rates of infection are below ours.
The unfortunate part of Deavel's work here deals with selective focus and the charge of inflated statistics. Little does he know that many deaths that were caused or contributed to by Covid-19 were not attributed to the virus because the person was not tested. And he seems to forget how the virus has hit minority communities very hard.
The model responses to the virus can be seen in places like Germany and South Korea. These nations responded much sooner to the virus than other nations. Both their infection and death rates are below that of the US.
I've been tracking the statistics for my state and I can say that what Deavel has been reporting has not occurred here. In addition, NYC resources were overwhelmed to the point that they opened field hospitals, built temporary hospital facilities, and saw the arrival of Navy hospital ship--the latter was not for Covid-19 patients. Some hospitals had to transfer their Covid-19 patients to designated hospitals after their own treatment equipment broke down because of the demand those patients created on their systems.
At least part of the US has been shutdown for 1 and 1/2 months and we have already seen 580,000+ infections with a current death rate of 4.06%. And again, not all Covid-19 deaths are being recorded as such because not all have been tested for the virus. Part of that was because there is a shortage of tests here. Without the lockdown, those numbers would very easily be higher. And Deavel's point about not shutting down for the last flu season ignores what medical experts say about the death rate of the flu vs that of the virus.
Huge and sudden changes in the parts of life that we love create dissonance. And the easiest way to relief the dissonance is to deny the the circumstances. And as normal as that is, it cannot argue against the facts on the ground. No one who has instituted a lockdown believe that such a response can be maintained. That is because of the economic realities of our lives here. At the same time, we can't afford to deny the other reality, the threat of the virus. And that is what Deavel seems to have done.
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